[Rubyinstaller-devel] One-Click Ruby Installer needs a new home, can you help him?

[Charles Roper]

Luis Lavena wrote:

> I decided that the best for the project is going to be a public
> contest/challenge/competition with polls for voting. See my reply to
> Michal about it.

You want to perhaps be a little bit cautious of a competition because 
voters inevitably vote for eye-candy and fail to consider other more 
subtle issues, such as context, continuity and ease of build/maintenance.

Also, how far would you want entrants to go? Would the expectation be 
for them to build an entire site? Would they do full IA with wireframes? 
Or just templates? Or templates + HTML/CSS?

If you really do want to go down the competition route and you have some 
cash to dedicate, you might want to consider CrowdSpring: 
http://www.crowdspring.com/

Here is an example of a t-shirt site competition: http://tr.im/m4ZY

The key in this (and any creative endeavour, for that matter) is in the 
brief. What you've done so far is great, but I would also extend it by 
providing 5 sites you like and 5 sites you don't like. That will give 
designers a much better idea of what (and what you're not) after.

I would say that it would be advantageous to tap into the 'Ruby 
aesthetic' in order to preserve a sense of brand and continuity. Check 
out these 5 for instance:

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
http://ruby-toolbox.com/
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
http://www.engineyard.com/
http://rubyonrails.org/

There is definitely a sense of continuity there, but each one is 
distinct in its own way.

I think I mentioned to you before that I would be willing to help with 
the site, but that just hasn't panned out for me. I would be able to 
help in advising on the brief and on the designs and so on, though.

One final thought, have you thought of approaching someone like Heroku 
for some sponsored hosting? I'm sure they would probably like to put 
their name to a high-profile project like this, and the easy-to-deploy, 
'instant' nature of Heroku would be a good match for the OCI.

Charles