On Monday 26 March 2007 16.24:25 MJ Ray wrote:
> [...] too much news-style ick in the user
> list. That would make it have less impact, as readers will notice and
> may discount it as marketing more than reports.
Hmm. This begs the question of the purpose of this users list.
* we want to show that many people do indeed use Debian, and use it for
some stated reason. --> mostly marketing.
* we want to know who uses Debian so that we can improve Debian to better
serve our users. --> more market research than marketing.
I always assumed the list to be more the first kind of list than the second,
but of course, as I've shown in this discussion, I'm not involved too
deeply in how this list is created. I have, however, never seen anybody
refer to list entries in discussions about improving Debian - IMHO the
second kind of feedback is coming in via bugs.d.o and the various mailing
lists.
(... topic drift: it is in such situations where I always feel the www pages
could really profit from a clearer structure[0], e.g. by using subdomains
or clear visual distinctions - color schema, whatever: a part for people
who don't know about Debian and stumbled over the name, a part for Debian
users, from newbie to expert, and a part for people contributing (or
wanting to) to Debian (DD and others.)
Obviously there's overlap since we want people in the first category to
become people in the 2nd, and people there to become people in the 3rd
category, so there's always going to be grey areas.
Now the entries in the users list would certainly be written differently
depending on whether they're on "http://about.debian.org/";
or "http://developers.debian.org/";
as an aside: there was a time where http://advocacy.postgresql.org/ existed,
and, as far as I perceived it, they had exactly this problem: some people
wanted a web site to discuss advocacy, coordinate events, plan the redesign
for the main web site etc., while others started to design a PostgreSQL
marketing web site. I don't know how that story ended, but it was very
interesting to read those discussions.)
cheers
-- vbi
[0] you see, I'm doing it again - throwing ideas around and not following up
on them. At least I've lost the habit of promising I'd work on this.
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