Talk:Website
From 4freedom
Wolfear's two cents (Probably not worth that much, but keep the change):
Forum: We have our in-world chats (but we all know that sometimes trying to hold a conversation can be near impossible if the other person is busy or distracted).
We (now) have IRC for those prefer a real-time, personal response outside of SL where they have time to have a conversation.
A forum would be good in that it gives a very simple way for us to interact with the public outside of Second Life for those who have questions and want information but do not have the time for a full chat session.
While it is true that there may only be a few group members active at first, this shouldn't deter us from having as many open channels of communication as possible. If people cannot talk to us, how can we educate them?
Forum activity is also an effective metric of how well we are accomplishing our goals. If we are doing things right, we should see more people asking questions, posting replies, and an active community forming.
Blog: Many of us keep abreast of developments in the free software community but cannot devote to a full time blog (Lord knows I have a hard time trying to keep up with mine). However, as mentioned during the meeting, the capacity for member submitted articles with comments would effectively match the purpose of a blog without requiring an army of full-time writers.
Wiki: Here I disagree. In the context of a fully capable CMS with a user/group permission system, a public wiki is redundant. Additionaly, once the web site is indexed in the search engines, there is the constant hassles of securing against and removing bot spam. Things will be hard enough on a main web site (and especially with forums, public registrations and user profiles, if such are used) without an extra area to police.
If a wiki is really a necessity, keep this one and use it strictly internally as, so far, we do not seem to have a spam problem here.
Mailing List/Newsletters: Essential. Mailing lists are another great metric of how well we are meeting our goals.
Shop: Not so sure about this one. Getting into ecommerce types of activities opens a whole new can of worms. Personal suggestion is keep this in mind, but table it for a while as it is a good idea, but not for the near future.
Additional Ideas:
Web Links: An organized area for links to important sites (FSF for example) and open-source alternatives (i.e.- FireFox, OpenOffice)
Downloads: Maybe. Maybe not. Might be a good spot to share things such as free textures, scripts, downloadable articles/tutorials, hard to find documentation for open source software, etc.
