[theforum] Re: google adwords: next step

[Martin Burns]

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On 10 May 2004, at 19:47, Mike King wrote:

> I totally agree that we need people to manage projects like beo 
> adverts and the weo redesign. There must be a number of projects that 
> have died a death because no-one 'owned' them.

And, on the other hand, projects that *have* succeeded (beo mirrors, 
leo/beo/deo move) where someone (or a very small group of people) 
*have* owned them.

> Personally, I feel that we need someone to drive evolt.org forward. 
> Someone with a vision of what evolt shoud be, and the backing of the 
> rest of the members to get it done, or at least on the way to getting 
> it done. A CEO, if you will. Not permanent, but elected and with some 
> power of choice.

I think so. Without at all wanting to sound gripey about it, steering 
*could* have taken that role if it had chosen to do it... It didn't, so 
we are where we are. I think the two sides to that suggestion are a 
great balance - the person in question has the power not as of right, 
or by 'being here longer', but by being loaned it by the organisation.

> There's questions we need to ask ourselves. I belive it will take 
> someone with a leadership role, to take evolt forward:
>
> - Are we extinct. Is there a need for an evolt.org in the current 
> working-web world?

And/or is the need the same one as in 1998?

At the time, the majority of the issues the web-working population 
faced were very low-level coding ones - HTML rendering, building 
everything from scratch with ASP/Perl/whatever because standards were a 
total joke (ok, not *that* much has changed :-) ) and there were no 
pre-packaged tools[1] to do many basic web content tasks like workflow, 
session/authentication management and so on.

[1] Unless, maybe, you had $100k+ to splash

And looking at thelist, many of the topics are still at that level. 
Which is fine if you're a junior coder, but doesn't really give members 
any benefit once they've got past it. I'm sure all of us who've been 
here a while have had experience with just not getting questions 
answered, or even not feeling that the higher tool we use isn't being 
used by anyone else.

Kind of a related, personal rant that will I'm sure draw "But Martin, 
our members don't work for the kind of clients you do" responses. I'm a 
wee bit fed up with the assumption that evolt members only deal with 
small clients who think paying over $1000 for a site/system is 
outrageously expensive. While that may be true for many, the assumption 
that it's always so is a bit limiting. I'm sure that there are either 
members who are currently facing the same larger client and/or more 
expensive software issues I am and they're just hiding, or we're 
putting them off, when something evolt-like would be useful for them.

Example today: I've been beating my head on a brick wall with Kana 
Marketing Automation:
http://www.kana.com/solution/marketingsolution/campauto.aspx
and the only place I felt I could go to for support, to ask the basic 
type of "I'm not being stupid, this *should* work, right?" question, 
was the vendor.

Right, rant over. You can now scourge me for working for large clients 
at overpriced rates (which i see precious little of).

Cheers
Martin
- --
Now playing on iTunes: "Delilah" by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band 
from 'Delilah' - a hit from way back in 1975

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