Re: New LilyPond website

[Urs Liska]

Hi John,

Am 11.12.2016 um 22:36 schrieb John Roper:
> I would really love to help, but I can spend the time fighting with
> every single person on the thread.
> 

Please let me share some personal memories with you.

You may know that I am one of the longer-lasting and pretty active
people in the LilyPond community. I have not contributed much to
LilyPond's code itself but all the more to the ecosystem. But that's of
course not the point.

My very first contribution to LilyPond's Git repository was about the
website too, and it went really similar to what you just experienced. In
a way I made the same mistake that you did, faced the same reaction, and
was at the brink of throwing the towel when someone (actually it was
Graham) made the essential remarks.

I didn't want to change the appearance of the website but its content. I
found the writing and the logic in the "introduction" tour insufficient,
and it looked to me like being written by developers who didn't have the
perspective of the actual target audience of the website anymore.
What I did was more or less completely rewrite this suite of pages (OK,
I tried to keep as much of it, but essentially it was a fundamental
rewrite), created a dummy website and proposed that to the developer
community.

Reactions were very similar to what you faced, and it was quite harsh at
times, although I was sure I was right, at least with my analysis, of
course not necessarily with the "single correct solution".

Graham then made two striking remarks:
First: The website is something *everybody* can and does have a
(potentially strong) opinion about. So patches (or suggestions)
concerning the website are much more likely to trigger debate and
dissent than obscure changes deeply hidden within the code that barely
anyone reads and understands.
Second: When you're coming freshly to a team (and correct me if I'm
wrong but your "New website" thread seems to be your very first
appearance on the scene at all, while I had already been a well-known
community member back then) and propose such a fundamental change it is
even more likely to face strong opposition and/or controversial debate.

Graham's suggestion then (and I believe he said something similar now) was:
* Strip your suggestions down to small, coherent changes
* Present them one after another
* Start with presumably uncontroversial things
* Expect your authority on the subject to grow with
  each applied patch
* This also gives you the chance to grow into the system, workflow and
  requirements/restrictions

I followed that suggestion and got most of my ideas through to the
current state of the website content. The main issue with this approach
is that it will take much longer to achieve the final goal (and I assume
there *were* some of my initial ideas that got lost during the process),
but it will run with much less friction, and through the iterative
nature of the process possibly with better overall results.

I think there's still a chance to continue implementing your ideas if
you'll be able not to perceive such a step-back as a failure or a
defeat. Especially as Graham had actually just started turning some of
your code into a patch.

Best regards
Urs