Should renaming come before the website launch?

The PMC met an hour ago (see Project Management Committee (PMC) meeting notes - #13 by yanokwa) and has decided to adopt the most recent proposal, but moving the launch date up to next Tuesday, May 29th.

The process for making changes to the website will be through our normal file issue, send in a PR, merge by a committer process at https://github.com/opendatakit/website. The caveat is that @yanokwa and @W_Brunette must both approve review and approve changes before they can go live. Changes that are contentious will require a tie-breaking vote from another member of the PMC.

If you'd like to help with this effort, a number of us will be meeting in #website on the Slack starting tomorrow at 2 pm EDT to help clear up any confusing parts of the site. We'll work asynchronously in that channel until the site is live.

So to summarize, http://staging.opendatakit.org will launch as the ODK website on Tuesday, May 29th at 00:00 UTC (8 pm EDT). If you'd like to help, go to http://slack.opendatakit.org and join the #website channel.

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I'm late to post but have followed the conversation. Thanks to everyone for their thoughtful posts and discussion here in the open; it's been an interesting read. I'm glad the PMC decided to adopt the most recent proposal.

  • On splitting, I would add my voice to the opposition. A new brand would probably result in some short term confusion and have some long term benefits; but I agree with the sentiments around ODK project valuing multiple tools to solve different use cases. I would like to see both remain under the ODK brand. We (Red Cross) plan on using both in the future depending on the situation and needs. Keeping the two linked by the ODK brand is helpful for us.
  • On website launching (and sequencing), I think updating the website can come before figuring out the branding/naming. I think it would be better to launch it soon with some information missing rather than wait and continue to have a mix of outdated and deprecated information on the old website. In my opinion, would be great just making it easier for people to end up looking at the new documentation and end up on the forums.

Will try and comment sooner and contribute in the #website Slack channel and other places where this conversation continues!

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Lots of discussion on the renaming. Want to add a response to the below (which others have raised in some version as well).

In the Red Cross Movement, technical people responsible for implementing (install and deploy) are going to be moderately sophisticated and able to understand the software. But these people have to explain software recommendations to sometimes very non-technical audiences (management, senior leadership, media, etc.). And in such cases, the names do create a major hurdle that would hopefully be lower if not for the implied sequencing etc by "1" and "2".

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This is such an important point.

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Just an example of confused users: Difference between Suitcase and Briefcase - #2 by abdoul

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