I think Simon's ideas are great and get even better since he's willing to do them!
I think leveraging openacs.com is a great idea. Whether that be creating a business centric page or just redirecting it to openacs.org is kind of secondary to providing a link into the project from what is traditionally a more "commercial" entry point.
That being said, when we were developing the first iteration of the next openacs.org, I for one tried to push a more marketing savvy perspective into the functionality.
Namely, a place where feature articles about companies, projects, developers, ideas could be rotated on a random basis to keep the homepage fresh and to advertise the diversity of the community.
Another way we could do this is to introduce a kind of (and I'm hesitant to use this term in such a high quality community) slashdot blog. Since we are looking for new ideas, competition and other interesting items, it might be cool to have a section where people can submit article or ideas for community review.
For instance, article concerning elearning could be dissected and put into to the context of dotlrn, or vice versa. Articles about the latest in web/db. Specs that people have written for new OpenACS modules. etc.
This way we have a more systematic way of discussing things that could provide insights into ways the community could improve itself or the code. Also, it would provide another way of allowing non-developers to participate.
It also gives business people and other developers a sense of the vibrance of the community apart from what is often obtuse technical discussion or things that are very specific to OACS.
I don't want to see openacs.org to devolve to /. or to a PHPNuke site, but this might be a nice community feature beyond the community of developers. It could also keep us from having our blinders on too tight.
talli
