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Сергей Давыдов
Well, after one more tiny cycle of rise-and-fall, I guess I'll intervene. There were two ufurmix releases after all...
The first thing I want to do is to +1 Mr. The Plague, who has been asking rather constructive quesions.
Second, I want to share some simple [sometimes eye-opening] wisdoms I have learned so far:
You don't need any organization or structure to do something.
You don't need any PR team and hardly any PR to do something.
To get other people to do something, you have to do something cool yourself first. <the great quote of Linus Torvalds goes here - google it yourself, I'm tired of copy-pasting it>
Summary from those wisdoms: most of the talks in here were useless.
Don't wait for others. Think. Hack. Mock up. Share everything you do. That's the only thing that can get things rolling.
</cheaptalks>
Some random wisdoms, as an added bonus:
Brainstorming is good. Do more of it.
A design or a vision is a great accomplishment.
Design docs and mockups are highly inspirational if they contain cool ideas, as long as they look like mockups and don't resemble real UI (e.g. black hand-drawn lines and handwritten font on white background).
You already have cool stuff to hack not bound to the OS; there's search.furrychan.ru that urgently needs love (or some styling from late ufurmix artwork at least); I posted a list a while back, google it or something.
Website mantenance is as hard as making an OS; in case of limited resources you have to choose and make only one thing of the two.
Google docs, wave and a bunch of other services would work better for collaboration than a self-hosted website.
If you happen to accomplish something big, post it to a news site like flayrah. It will probably get you more publicity and contributors than anything else.
Google already contains all the info you might need. If it seems that it doesn't, contact me.
Hang out in the IRC. Get to know each other.
Never say "I can't". When I started ufurmix, I was a 15 y/o kid with one year of ubuntu experience as a mere user.
(I also had some trouble with my parents so I had to work secretly at night when nobody saw me using a pc).
You CAN, damn.
Сергей Давыдов
> Some of the stuff brings up something i was thinking OpenFur should do,
> That is to stop being a OS only developer and go into general programs
> and apps for cross-platform systems (as well has fixing up websites and
> other furry related technical help). That way not only can we get stuff
> done, but we can build up a better name for ourselves so more people
> would be interested in our bigger long term projects like the OS.
+1
In particular, finishing the styling for search.furrychan.ru and giving it a better domain name would be nice. e.g. my http://content.wuala.com/contents/Shnatsel/Ubuntu%20Furry%20Remix/Source%20&%20Stuff/whirls-bar-older.svg/?dl=1 might make a nice background for the search box.
Cricetida could use some love.
Hosting some articles with rationales for releasing art under creative commons licenses is also a great thing to do (based on http://questioncopyright.org/sita_distribution and some other articles)
Lobbying introducing Creative Commons in FA or InkBunny or whatever like they are in DeviantArt would be neat.
Heck, even a design document describing various furry-related ideas in technology would be awesome - e.g. that authentication idea would work not only for an OS - it fits a website perfectly, too. (After all, we don't even have to hack anything ourselves to change the world for good - thinking and presenting ideas can be enough. BTW I still haven't seen any good picture-presenting pages, not only in furry online galleries but in any galleries at all, so I might make a design doc about it someday).
> Basically the OS would be more tweaks to the base and our custom apps
> rolled into one for people who want to try the apps without installing
> and/or patching their existing system while others can do so if they
> choose. This will give us a broader scope and allow for possible money
> making ventures in the future.
+1 here too
> Also is there anything that i could do PR wise, currently my programming
> skills are sub-par but i have great social skills. Plus i want to try
> and make OpenFur a much more open and out there feeling company, so are
> users will feel more friendly toward us.
That's great!
Сергей Давыдов
hmm, wrong link actually... http://content.wuala.com/contents/Shnatsel/Ubuntu%20Furry%20Remix/Source%20&%20Stuff/whirls-bar-coloured.svg/?dl=1 - this one is better