Lars, I totally agree that people will turn away if it's too much work involved in understanding what the system can do. What does too much work mean? Well, when I was checking out those PHP groupware systems I would leave within a few minutes if I couldn't find a public demo system that shows how usable their UI is, and which applications and features you get out of the box.
So what I am suggesting then is that we set up a demo system and I propose that we use dotLRN. There is no doubt in my mind that dotLRN is the flagship that the community needs to rally around and I believe that a dotLRN demo system would offer quite a compelling selling pitch. This demo system should have a very prominent link both on the openacs.org and the dotlrn.org homepages. Is it realistic to have such a demo system up by middle of August at least?
The other concrete thing that I want to propose is that we use dotLRN / OpenACS to manage our own subprojects. For example, the OpenACS 4.6 launch should have its own homepage, with its own discussion forum, task manager (ticket tracker) and members (the equivalent of a class in dotLRN). After all, it's exactly this kind of groupware we are trying to sell, so we should be using it to do our own work. That will help us not only gain credibility but also find new ways of improving the software for the compelling reason of easing our own daily routines.
