[Zope-dev] Overhauling the Zope 2 presentation on zope.org

[Martin Aspeli]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 11:59, Martin Aspeli <optilude+lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>> We
> 
> Yes. But not *I*. And you asked if *I* could get it done. :) Perhaps
> you meant if I could nag people into doing it. I doubt that I could.
> I'm not good at making people do things for free. :)
> 
> I think the way your formulated this is indicative of the problems.
> It's a case of "Somebody is not working here". I.e. "This should be
> done" or "Somebody needs to do X". Well, there isn't anybody called
> Somebody here, so as long as "Somebody" needs to do it, it won't get
> done. :) 

Sure. This wasn't the approach when I was actually trying to get 
something done. I specifically asked for volunteers for specific tasks. 
It didn't work at the time.

> This is one of the common obstacles of committee work, and it
> seems zope-web unfortunately got a dose of it. Maybe we are getting
> out of the slump thanks to Andreas, but if not I again suggest the
> Zope Foundation appoints a Web Tsar with full access to everything
> that gets completely free hands to do whatever he wants (after the
> foundation has taken a backup of everything) and see what happens. :)

The problem is not giving people decision making power. The problem is 
getting content. Somebody has to write it. We had carte blanche on what 
messages to put out there and how to structure things.

>  I'm also lazy, which are the reasons I haven't volunteered for the
> role of Web Tsar already, as being bad at getting people to work for
> free would mean I have to do everything myself, and I'm too lazy for
> that. :)

IMHO, the way the Zope community is structured, it's very hard to get 
people to contribute this kind of thing. I hope things are different 
now. The work that happened with the Zope book is encouraging, for 
example. However, most people who care enough about Zope to want the 
website to be better are too busy or too much into coding. Unlike, say, 
Rails, there isn't a large community of "fanboys" who want to contribute 
and have time on their hands and the right "soft" skills.

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book