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

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey,

Jan Ulrich Hasecke wrote:

> 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. ;-)

Yes, actually getting people to write things is hard in my experience as 
well.

> 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.
[snip]

That's a good idea.

[snip]
>> 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.

Actually I consider the "Zope is hard to explain" issue as quite 
serious. Some bits of Zope 2 and Zope 3 and Grok are difficult to 
explain. Part of the thing Grok tries to do is to make Zope 3 easier to 
explain.

> 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.

Understood, I think you have some good suggestions here. The 
project-based funding makes sense to me.

Now we only need to find the funds. :)

Regards,

Martijn