Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to End users network

• Everything going on in connection with it and openACS.org is being done by people who are (mostly) not only highly proficient software engineers or adept "managers" (who comprehend and are fluent in things most computer users don't and aren't), but are, in a sense, true artists who share a set of values related to keeping the "original spirit" of the Internet alive and well;
• Part of that "value system" is a deep (and well-founded) digust with the "commercialization" o f the Internet; and
• Anything that smacks of "sales" or "marketing" is (by default and often "unconsciously") a part of that commercialization; and
• Anything that "looks and feels" like the Javascripted front page of the site linked above, or anything as "sophmoric" as the "Tour" linked above, smacks of "sales" and "marketing," and is therefore "off limits."
• Or something like that.

First of all, you're probably right about some of us being disgusted with some of the worst side effects of commercialization of the internet and web. Recently I've been getting spammed by people who send me soft porn photos right in the mail, rather than just the usual HTML hyperlink text crap. Yes, that annoys me.

But I don't think folks here are totally opposed to marketing. After all, several of us who are key players are making our living doing custom client work with the toolkit and the better known it is, the better our chances of being able to continue doing so.

There's no way that I'm volunteering as OpenACS 4 project manager out of sheer altrusm. I'm not paid to do so but if I don't do so I'm less likely to get paying freelance jobs.

Comparing the site you point to with this site's a bit strange. That's an end-user site providing end-user services. It could be built> easily enough using OpenACS, but openacs.org isn't going to provides such services.

Now ... as far as the "Tour" goes .. yes, it would be nice to have a demo site. We want our new version of this website to be more attractive visually, organizationally, and functionally too (and Talli's gang have gotten a great start - we're holding off because OpenACS 4/PG is just now getting to the point where it is stabilizing).

And we do encourage people to list sites they've built using OpenACS, too.

Our audience at openacs.org isn't the end-user per se, but rather the user who will build end-user sites. Yes, we need to make that task as easy as possible, and as well documented as possible. But we're building tools you can use to build something, not the "something" itself.

Other than this site, which we do want to become something of a showcase for what can be done.

The biggest problem we face is one of resources. Most of the folks working on this project our doing so on their own time, or only as a portion of their job. Those who are able to help out as part of their job are mostly involved in nitty-gritty client site development and are leveraging that by porting code to Postgres, or adding new features, etc. They're not being paid to write beginner documentation, package things to install more easily, etc.

And there's an immense amount of programming work left to be done until we'll be satisified with what we have.

If you or anyone else wants to help by publicizing sites you've made, write white papers extolling the fact that the toolkit saved you time, works well, etc - hey, we'll publish your contributes. Have no fear. Write case studies and provide other backup documentation galore that we can shove at clients. We'd *love* to have that stuff.

And if we had time we'd work on that kind of stuff ourselves. I'm sure we will over the next few months now that the mountain of work associated with porting OpenACS 4 to our bi-RDBMS platform is largely complete. We have a lot to do to improve it, stuff that will take a lot of programming, but nothing like the effort that's been undertaken over the last several months.

When dotLRN is done, I'm confident that Sloan will be putting energy into promoting it. dotLRN is probably more along the lines of what you're looking for, i.e. it's a canned vertical application built on top of the basic toolkit and therefore presents a polished exterior to the user.

As time goes on and OpenACS 4 matures, it would be *great* to have a demo site that gives examples of things you can easily build with the toolkit. It would be great to show off subsiting and the ability to alter look-and-feel for each, for instance.

Yep, it would be *great* but these things don't happen by themselves. People need to step forward and work.