[Grok-dev] Re: Python UK meeting and Django

[Jan Ulrich Hasecke]

Hi,

Am 07.05.2008 um 15:19 schrieb Martijn Faassen:

> My worry is that if you set up a fund to do marketing and  
> documentation  you separate it from the community too much, and  
> take away from the community the responsibility of having to care  
> about these topics. I'm convinced that we, as developers of the  
> platform, need to care about attracting people to our platform  
> (where we can call these people "users" or "developers").

In fact there is an other problem with a fund. We had a fund in the  
DZUG to improve the documentation on zope.de, but we never found  
someone, who wanted to do it. ;-)

So a too general fund might not work at all.

A better approach is to raise a fund for a special project, which  
only can be done with a certain amount of work, which exceeds the  
usual voluntary work. We do this sometimes for a publication that is  
distributed on fairs like CeBIT or Systems.
http://www.zope.de/redaktion/dzug/zope-news
We write and publish paid articles with case studies to get the whole  
publication paid.

An other example is a white paper about Plone, which I made as a spin- 
off product after I wrote some articles for it-magazines about Plone.  
One was even paid. ;-)
http://www.zope.de/redaktion/dzug/anwendungen/plone3.pdf/view
This feature overview was downloaded more than 1500 times in three  
months. This is pure marketing not documentation. Every time someone  
asks -- e.g. in xing.com -- for a cms recommendation, I can now point  
him to this white paper.

Currently I am planning a white paper about zope to have all the  
things that make Zope unique in one place. I calculate an amount of  
40 hours to get it done. I really love to promote Zope, Plone and  
Grok on a voluntary basis and I do it a lot. But not being a  
programmer I will never benefit from this white paper so I am looking  
for sponsors.

>
> Writing documentation also helps you think about how things can be  
> done better. If something is hard to explain, it may be a what  
> we're trying to explain is too inconsistent or complicated. If it's  
> hard to convince people to use our stuff, that means we might need  
> improve our stuff, too! Having a separate group of people do this  
> may lead to a disconnect that shouldn't be there.


This is a good point. Perhaps we lack documentation because Zope is  
too hard to explain. ;-)

No serious. I hope that you understand that I do not want to separate  
the documentation and marketing efforts from the community. That  
would be bad. All efforts paid or voluntary should be rooted in the  
community.

Viele Grüße
juh

-- 
DZUG e.V. (Deutschsprachige Zope User Group)
http://www.zope.de



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