[Webteam] Re: [squeak-dev] Subcommunities and forks

[Brad Fuller]

Matthew has a good point. I suggest we talk about this as input to the
organization of the website.

My POV: We could organize the site around the needs of individuals
rather than around the technology of squeak. It's not about forks, but
around the needs of groups of individuals: as Matthew mentions: office
(he says presentations), fun, learning, development, etc. It wouldn't
matter if the Squeak community goes the way of forks or not. The site
would serve each individual's needs better because it addresses what
they are searching for - no matter how it's presented to them: be it
forks, packages, helpful notes, whatever.


On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 1:11 AM, Matthew Fulmer <tapplek at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 09:51:01AM +0200, Klaus D. Witzel wrote:
>> If you promise to not take it personal: this is a question I often hear in
>> the marketing department: why do people click the old stuff when their
>> answers in the survey clearly point to the new stuff. Response from the
>> WWW guy: these are most likely different (sub-)communities and we have no
>> technical tools for relating individual downloaders with individual survey
>> participants. Have a tool?
>
> This is very true. This community is trying to go many different
> directions at once, but instead of give each subgroup a vehicle
> to go further faster, we put them in one huge room (squeak.org).
> This is why I think forks are very important for the community:
> give each subgroup the perfect tool for their task. Want a lean
> mean seaside developing machine? Pharo is the fork for you. Need
> to have a great experience building presentations with squeak?
> use etoys. Need to get a package as widely distributed as
> possible? LPF can help with that. Wanna just see what's
> available? FunSqueak is what you want.
>
> That mostly leaves squeak.org with blue-plane researchers, who
> mostly need a kernel image that they can build anything on.
>
> Identifying sub-communities and giving them an optimized squeak
> for their needs will help us stop bickering about what should or
> should not be in the squeak.org release, because, really, there
> is no image that will satisfy everybody. However, there are only
> a dozen or so sub-communities striving to emerge, and each will
> be quite happy with one or two images with the average of what
> the members of that subcommunity want.
>
> --
> Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
>
>



-- 
Brad Fuller
www.bradfuller.com