Re: Google Summer of Code 2009

[Evgeniy Ivanov]

Hi,

On Sat March 7 2009 11:20:00 olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 12:52:04PM +0100, Thomas Schwinge wrote:
> > I do know that Olaf likes to use them, but what about making these
> > texts more formally appealing and remove all (or most of) the smileys?
>
> I can only repeat my petition to disable this idiotic image replacement
> -- it indeed makes the smileys look silly.
>
> However, I object to removing the smileys. I put them in for a reason:
> liking them has nothing to do with it.
>
> These pages are for the potential students to read. Many of them are new
> to free software development, and most of them are rather awed by it. An
> overly formal text would only make it worse. Our requirements for the
> application are probably intimidating enough without it -- we should do
> everything possible to counteract that!
>
> I believe the friendly smileys to have an important psychological
> effect: they have the express purpose of making the text less formal and
> thus intimidating.

As a former GSoCer I can confirm it. More than that: it's important for people 
who are new to your community, but not just to free software.
As we discovered with Sergey at the meeting: every organization has its own 
outstanding characteristics, so people always think: who are that guys doing 
Hurd? And smileys are really friendly (except those ugly gifs).


-- 
Best regards, Evgeniy.
Key Fingerprint: F316B5A1F6D2054FCD18B74A95400ABB1FE567A3

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.