[Grok-dev] Re: Another idea for promoting Grok

[Martijn Faassen]

Kamon Ayeva wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 9:55 AM, Alexander Limi <limi at plone.org 
> <mailto:limi at plone.org>> wrote:
> 
>     On Thu, 05 Jun 2008 06:19:43 -0700, Kamon Ayeva
>     <kamon.ayeva at gmail.com <mailto:kamon.ayeva at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>         We all know the value of Grok and the Zope 3 technologies it is
>         based on.
>         But I face the current issue : How do I convince people around
>         me to invest
>         in (or at least evaluate) Grok ?
>         Many people around us have discovered Django or Pylons or TG (to
>         only name
>         those) and it seems difficult to talk about anything Zope to them.
> 
> 
>     My approach would be:
> 
>     "No, it's not based on Zope — it's using some of the Zope libraries
>     for Component Architecture, etc". That's one way of looking at it
>     that lets people understand that it's NOT the Zope 2 they tried N
>     years ago and hated. Framing it like this will highlight the
>     difference from Zope 2, which is that Zope 3 is essentially a
>     collection of libraries to most Zope 3 developers.
> 
> 
> Agreed.

It's not exactly true though; it's based on Zope 3 far more than just 
using a couple of libraries. That said, I fully agree we should present 
Grok as its own thing primarily, not as "that Zope thing", to the 
outside world. That's the opportunity Grok gives us. Our primary set of 
arguments should be: "Grok is cool and good and powerful, and this is why".

I think we can base a secondary set of arguments around our relationship 
with Zope. Strength of the Zope community, experience, power of Zope 3, 
etc, etc. This should be the things we say *second*, and the primary 
arguments should stand on our own. I do think it's helpful to say them; 
we can't hide our relationship with Zope anyway and we shouldn't, we 
should turn it into the strength it truly is.

[snip]
>     Getting Grok into the hands of developers in "established" markets
>     such as the Plone one (go five.grok!) would help with the legitimacy
>     part, and also bring lots of new developers.
>  
> It is true that developers that would like the Grok way of doing, and 
> start using it in their current developments (for instance in 
> Plone-land) would help promote it, and would easily try 
> Grok-the-web-framework.

I agree fully that getting Grok in the hands of established places of 
the community (such as, very importantly, Plone developers) is 
important. We should do it. This is the easiest audience to convince, 
and we should to it. For myself, I won't be doing that work, though; I 
will give advice about five.grok, and I'll mention it happily in talks 
about Grok, but it's not going to be my primary focus. So if people want 
this to happen people will need to do the work.

We shouldn't be too inward focused though. I'm pretty confident that 
five.grok will happen and that there will be buy-in from that audience. 
But we also want *fresh* blood in our community, reach Python 
programmers that never used anything Zope related before, and convince 
them that Grok is the way to go.

> And, with a bit of effort, we can make 2009 the year of Grok.
> 
> Spread the mantra from Lennart: "... Zope has been fixed !" ;)

As a secondary argument. :) Yup: "Zope is back, and his name is Grok".

>     five.grok-sprint-at-europython-please-ly yours, ;)

Part of your regular Grok sprint! Please sign up here:

http://wiki.zope.org/grok/EuroPython2008Sprint

Regards,

Martijn