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@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/
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