[ILUG] [Fwd: Linux on TV3]

[Donncha O Caoimh]

You're right, but the perspective you're giving is what we need.
Sometimes when you're so close to a project it's easy to miss the
details, as you point out. We covered the major things, got the
tutorials in there, some community stuff, but we are missing content on
what we are as an organisation. 
What the committee does, even if it's a summary of what the (mostly
quiet) committee mailing list discusses, is a mystery to everyone else.
(Not advocating full disclosure, a small team can do things effectively
that a large cannot, sometimes, yes, yes, open source and all that, but
those big groups are passionate about their calling, we're talking about
organising, much more mundane in my view)

We *know* that the new site isn't the best laid out sometimes (witness
the search for connection scripts, Ken has linked them from the new user
section now.) Complaining about things gets things fixed.
Would people appreciate an automatically generated message informing the
list of major updates? That's a very easy thing to do, either with a
diff between versions of pages (unlikely to be popular/useful) or
comments added by the updating person.

There's a contribute link on the front page, admittedly, it should
probably be at the top of the page (puts on usability hat), but
something like it has always been on the site, significantly lowering
the barrier to entry for anyone wanting to help on the site. There are 3
people at the moment preparing articles AFAIR which is great!

As for new content, Adam Beecher recommended linking the mailing list
page off the side bar, as is done on http://cork.linux.ie/, I disagreed
with him at the time, as it belongs in the community section. Saying
that, it's one of the focal points of our group, so it probably should
get a place of honour on the side bar. 
The one major change which you've highlighted is more transparency for
the committee(reminds me of the government now.. ;). We do need a page
listing committee members, email addresses, the committee mailing list
address, some form of feedback directly to the committee. Reports on
what the administrators of the site are doing maintenance-wise (how many
of you know we updated to php4?)

It's a lot of work, looking for volunteers, not right now, wait 'till we
get something in place to handle the comms, hmm, Goldmine clone
required!

In reality, unless we figure out some way of doling out responsibility,
the only way this site can be administered is by someone on the dole,
that's the only way someone'll have time to do everything within a
reasonable time-span..

Donncha.


Noel Carroll wrote:
> 
> Thats a good post Donncha and it highlights a lot of stuff that a lot of us
> didn't know before.  It does seem however that a lot of the bigger things
> are being conentrated on while the smaller things are falling down.  The
> most obvious one is the lack of a contact or focus point for the
> comittee/ILUG as a whole on the site.  There are no recent minutes.  Anyone
> looking at the site from the outside world would assume that the core of
> ILUG was the list and that the ILUG was dying due to the amount of
> irrelevent rubbish and uber tech on this.  Its been 2 years since any new
> minutes were posted and there is no comittee list.   All you get is the
> webteam contact.  Now we both know that that is yourself and Ken et al. but
> an uninitiated browser wouldn't be privvy to this knowledge.  I'm of the
> opinion that the new site has been a disaster from the content point of
> view, while also being much more successful than the original aesthetically.
> The fact that it didn't work on launch day didn't help matters either and
> certainly doesn't present a good impression of the effectivness of the ILUG.
> Please take these points as constructive criticism. I'm trying not to
> personalise my comments in any way but I do believe that looking after
> little details matter greatly.
> 
> Noel
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Donncha O Caoimh [mailto:donncha.ocaoimh at tradesignals.com]
> > Sent: Friday, February 16, 2001 11:17 AM
>