Re: SEUL: Re: Reorganization

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <307e7af0.36105168@aol.com>, eamorical@aol.com writes:
>Roger writes:
>>But anyway..this is just part of a broader thread that I would like to
>>start. We need to rethink how the seul project is presented to the public --
>>currently we're doing some pretty neat things, but I don't think it's
>>catching the public's attention enough to get us many more workers.
>
>I believe the SEUL home page could be improved to help the above
>situation. Until I read Roger's post "SEUL: Re: RedHat and KDE (fwd)",

For those who recently subbed, you can read this at
http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/pub/Sep-1998/msg00000.html

>I didn't realize that several things that are on the home page even

did you mean "aren't on the home page" here?

It's true that we don't do a very good job of summarizing the current
situation of linux. I always kind of figured somebody else would do
that. :)

>existed. Also much of what's on the home page is about SEUL and
>perhaps should be acessed from a tag (I don't know if that is what you
>call it) labeled "ABOUT SEUL". The reason is that one only reads it
>once or twice. Usually when I go to a web site, I want to find some
>particular piece of information and I find it helpful if I can click on
>something which I hope will take me there.

Good point. From a cursory glance at the apache logs, people spend
between 15 seconds and 2 minutes looking at the front page before moving
on to something behind it. (I can provide many more statistics if people
want them, or just post the access_log.) We should be wary of putting any
vital information *only* on the front page, unless it's in the first ten
words.

>>I want to get people together and figure out which projects we should be
>>focusing on, how we can divide labor to get stuff done, and most importantly
>>how we can attract the right new people -- there are plenty of people
>>looking at our website each day, and I'm sure they'd be more psyched to work
>>if "their particular project" were being worked on. And either it's being
>>worked on somewhere else, in which case we need to be able to know to point
>>them to it, or somebody (they) should start it, here.
>
>This is excellent. For almost a year, I have been trying to grasp where
>Linux is at. I've just scratched the surface. I've seen various projects in
>need of a particular skill. If SEUL could get a handle on this so that people
>could come to SEUL to find out where they could do the most good, SEUL
>would become known as the place to go. Enough for now.

I should clarify: I meant my master todo list to be only for projects like
seul, independence, etc. End-user-oriented non-indepth-developer projects.
It would *not* be a global linux todo list. There are other places out there
that are (or ought to be) doing that better than us. We might branch into
that eventually (that would be really cool!) but we can't afford to focus on
it yet. If we look too high in the sky, we'll trip. (Sorry for the bad
analogy.)

>Bob

--Roger