[theforum] Vote Request

[Sarah Adams]

> I hereby cast my one lowly vote for yours and Tara's joint design to
> be the New Face of Evolt.

+1 for Tara's design

> *cough*
> http://planet.evolt.org/
> *cough*
> Trailed on the footer of every thechat post.

I don't think appending this to thechat messages is sufficient,
especially if we want this to actually be used by evolters for technical
posts (and not just casual thechat-type stuff).

This brings up something I've been thinking about for a while. I'm sure
there are many people on thelist who don't have a clue about all the
other great features of evolt - it's not just thelist, or even just
thelist and weo. There are plenty of other resources that people need to
know about if we don't want them to die. So why not include a bit more
information about this in the footer of thelist messages? I think a lot
of this comes down to a lack of awareness of everything that evolt has
to offer.

> *cough*evolters.org*cough*

So, which should be used for blogging, planet.evolt.org or evolters.org?
I'm confused! :) I suspect other people are, too.

> We don't need another redesign competition, we don't need another redesign
> (not right now), nor do we need votes.  We need content, we need people to
> provide that content, we need people to consume that content, we need people
> to manage that content, and we possibly need people to think of new things
> to do with evolt.org.
> 
> evolt.org is dying a slow death: let's re-energise the site by making it
> useful again.

I disagree (sort of). As I said before, evolt is not one or two things,
it is sum of it's parts: weo, thelist, beo, evolters.org, etc. As
someone else already mentioned, there are plenty of "classic" articles
on weo that likely still get tons of hits. thelist is also very active,
as it usually is, and I'm sure beo is as well. I'm not sure about the
rest of it, since I don't really know what there is (again, there's an
awareness issue).

I think the key to this "problem" is not that we are going in the wrong
direction with the discussion of mailing lists, it's that evolt doesn't
have a clear direction at all right now. I suggest that we:
(1) figure out what we want evolt to *be*, beyond a conglomeration of
parts that seem, right now, quite disparate; give evolt as a whole a
clearer identity
(2) figure out what can we do to make sure that the parts of evolt come
together successfully to encourage users of certain parts (esp. thelist)
to take a look at the rest of what evolt has to offer
(3) if we decide that fresh content is crucial to the survival of evolt,
find a way to encourage those who like writing articles to do so, and
perhaps get the FAQ feature that was recently discussed up and running
in a useful format

In the past, bringing topics like this to thelist has been frowned upon
as being off-topic, and for good reason - this is, after all, what
theforum is for. However, IMHO there is no harm in sending out a
semi-regular (monthly maybe) update to thelist about what is going on
with evolt: highlighting new content or features, as well as the
existing stuff, encouraging listers to post articles, post to a blog,
etc. Raising awareness within the community and encouraging people to
explore all that evolt has to offer couldn't possibly be a bad thing,
could it?

-- 
sarah adams
web developer & programmer
portfolio: http://sarah.designshift.com
blog: http://hardedge.ca