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

[Tim Knapp]

Hi Jan,

Thanks a lot for the links! Outta curiosity is the Plone 3 whitepaper
you reference below in English or German (just thought I'd ask before
downloading ;)

Thanks,
Tim

On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 19:16 +0200, Jan Ulrich Hasecke wrote:
> 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
> 
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