[TOS] How can we mark what activities a particular group is doing within TOS?

Chris Tyler chris at tylers.info
Tue Jul 27 03:21:43 UTC 2010


On Mon, 2010-07-26 at 16:25 -0400, Mel Chua wrote:
> Ian, Karsten, and I were talking earlier today about TOS as a neutral 
> gathering place where different groups and people came and brought and 
> talked about their work, and how each group can categorize and keep 
> track of the things they're doing within the TOS space.
> 
> I'd like to start keeping the Red Hat education strategy stuff I'm 
> working on as pages on the TOS wiki, and would like to mark them as such 
> - [[Category:Red Hat]], for instance, and perhaps a wiki page template 
> with a Shadowman logo and a note at the top that a particular project on 
> the TOS wiki (for instance, POSSE) is "a Red Hat community service." I 
> could also see this being useful for other orgs and schools - "Hosted by 
> OSU" or "an Allegheny project" or "brought to you by Seneca."
> 
> How would people feel about such templates? In suggesting this, I'm 
> trying to be conscious of both the need for TOS as a whole to remain a 
> brand-neutral space, and the need for folks to be able to point to their 
> organization's work *within* that neutral space - would this compromise 
> be ok?
> 
> If there are no objections in a day or two, we'll try it out and show 
> folks what it looks like and offer help to other groups who'd like to do 
> the same.


Hi Mel,

I think that what you propose is the opposite of a neutral meeting
place.

Consider what FreeDesktop.org would look like with such an organization:
imagine the pages there each bedecked with "A GNOME Initiative" or "A
KDE Community Service" or "An X.org Programme" logo/categorization. fd.o
was formed in part to overcome exactly that type of division.

Or to think this through another way, wouldn't you (while wearing a Red
Hat) feel less comfortable adding significant content to pages under the
banner "A Canonical Ltd. Community Service"?

I believe that branded content belongs on our own respective sites,
whether that of Seneca, Red Hat, Mozilla, Fedora, Canonical, or any
other umbrella. We all feel the pressures of branding; one of the main
benefits of TOS.o is that I can freely collaborate with others with that
pressure minimized.

-Chris




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