Note that for the website, while I would welcome a little look-refresh, I would not like to change the content too much for now. It already contains the info people usually need, but most importantly, as it is currently translated in 37 languages, any big change would require another translation effort... The priority for now is really to get the software translations updated, so I don't think adding more translation effort right now would be good.

As for the rest, there are lots of points in this task, it's hard to comment on all of them, but I'll comment at least on the first part:

"Rewrite all social media descriptions and make them punchier [deadline: before 1.0 release]"
That's ok if you have some suggestions.

" Include links to website in social media descriptions [deadline: before 1.0 release]"
This is already the case at least for facebook and twitter, and I just added it in the mastodon profile.

"Layout guidelines for more effective posts [deadline: before 1.0 release]"
I'm not against some advices, but I don't want our posts to sound like ads neither...

"Plan periodical posts to increment followers [deadline: before 1.0 release]"
This is always depending on if we have new things to communicate. Making new posts just to increase followers is not the goal.
Also, on a side note: we on-purpose don't communicate a lot on facebook/twitter because we don't want to promote those platforms for ethical reasons ( https://www.fsf.org/facebook ). The main source of info should stay our website (or mastodon, but the website has much more visitors in general).

"Compile a list of external forums (r/teachers, facebook teaching groups, etc.) where we can promote GCompris [deadline: before 1.0 release]"
That could be useful for sure.

In T13711#241752, @timotheegiet wrote:

Note that for the website, while I would welcome a little look-refresh, I would not like to change the content too much for now. It already contains the info people usually need,

Do you have stats of the site? Do we know how people navigate the site? How many people download from the site versus get GCompris from elsewhere?

but most importantly, as it is currently translated in 37 languages, any big change would require another translation effort...

That is very useful. I am sure we can start with just a re-design and fit in all the work that has already been done. One clear improvement for me, which does not subvert any of the work you have already done, is re-doing screenshots. The ones you have are tiny! And some, I think, are old.

Also a change in the layout to modernise the look will not change the content.

As for the rest, there are lots of points in this task, it's hard to comment on all of them, but I'll comment at least on the first part:

Yeah, we will need to split out into subtasks as we go along.

"Rewrite all social media descriptions and make them punchier [deadline: before 1.0 release]"
That's ok if you have some suggestions.

On it!

" Include links to website in social media descriptions [deadline: before 1.0 release]"
This is already the case at least for facebook and twitter, and I just added it in the mastodon profile.

Great! can tick it off the TODO list.

"Layout guidelines for more effective posts [deadline: before 1.0 release]"
I'm not against some advices, but I don't want our posts to sound like ads neither...

That is not the intention. Think of the KDE Tips, for example. They are punchy, fun and useful. And not ad-like at all. We can give advice to educators, point to resources in GCompris, post about GComprise related news. We are not out to spam anyone.

"Plan periodical posts to increment followers [deadline: before 1.0 release]"
This is always depending on if we have new things to communicate. Making new posts just to increase followers is not the goal.

Agreed. Increasing quality posts is to increase followers to increase GCompris' profiletp increase adoption, that is: increase communication effort to increase adoption.

Also, on a side note: we on-purpose don't communicate a lot on facebook/twitter because we don't want to promote those platforms for ethical reasons ( https://www.fsf.org/facebook ). The main source of info should stay our website (or mastodon, but the website has much more visitors in general).

In Promo we have had to bite the bullet and accepted that, if we want to help people become aware of FLOSS and the ethics that go with it, we have to go to places where those ethics are absent, i.e. the cesspool of proprietary social media platforms.

I any case, you don't have to do it. We will do it for you.

"Compile a list of external forums (r/teachers, facebook teaching groups, etc.) where we can promote GCompris [deadline: before 1.0 release]"
That could be useful for sure.

We are on it.

The truth is to get people to know about open source you have to use social media that theachers use and maybe you even have to think like all the companies out there and sound a little bit like an ad, bc while profit isn't the goal here targeting an audience and convincing them to check out the site is just the same.

" Include links to website in social media descriptions [deadline: before 1.0 release]"
This is already the case at least for facebook and twitter, and I just added it in the mastodon profile.
I'm not against some advices, but I don't want our posts to sound like ads neither...
This is always depending on if we have new things to communicate. Making new posts just to increase followers is not the goal.
Also, on a side note: we on-purpose don't communicate a lot on facebook/twitter because we don't want to promote those platforms for ethical reasons ( https://www.fsf.org/facebook ). The main source of info should stay our website (or mastodon, but the website has much more visitors in general).

In T13711#241771, @aronkvh wrote:

The truth is to get people to know about open source you have to use social media that teachers use and maybe you even have to think like all the companies out there and sound a little bit like an ad,

That said, Promo must be always respectful of the desires of projects maintainers and we will be so in this case also. Every step we make will be agreed upon with the maintainers of GCompris. We will have fruitful and productive collaboration.

As for Facebook and so on, I agree with you, @timotheegiet: I too detest those platforms and their lack of morals repel me. But to get people off of Facebook and other proprietary and ethically reprehensible platforms and softwares, you have to go there, to where the people who use them are, and guide them to the alternatives. Otherwise, how else would we reach them? Rest assured that the ultimate goal of promoting on FB or Twitter is not to enrich those platforms, but exactly the contrary.

On my side, as long as we reach the children and they can learn with GCompris, I am open to any way of communication, proprietary or open (as long as they are both supported, of course, with the focus on the open ones first). The aim is to promote GCompris, not the platform, we can still add a "follow the news on <insert open platform here>" to help people discovering them.

Regarding the website:

Make it easy to add resources (lesson plans, downloadable worksheets, etc.)

It is out of the scope of GCompris for now. This is not something we are doing or even planning to do in the software.

Enable a user-friendly forum for teachers, parents and kids?

2 questions there:

• What would be the aim? A "requests" board, teachers can share their views about GCompris, how they use it?
• Who would do the maintenance? One of the developer/teacher made an Element group: https://webchat.kde.org/#/room/#gcompris-teachers:kde.org. We can see how it goes before having to maintain a forum too, as it is quite time consuming.

In T13711#241767, @paulb wrote:

In T13711#241752, @timotheegiet wrote:

That is very useful. I am sure we can start with just a re-design and fit in all the work that has already been done. One clear improvement for me, which does not subvert any of the work you have already done, is re-doing screenshots. The ones you have are tiny! And some, I think, are old.

We already have the same images bigger: https://gcompris.net/screenshots_qt/
We only display the small ones because we load all of them and the page is really big (note: this is something we need to change, it goes with a redesign).
And for countries with bad internet access, we can't load the bigger ones there, else it would take a lot of time to load the page.
So yes, we need to revamp this page to make it better :).

In all cases, thank you for taking a loog at this :)

Fb and I think twitter should be only used to raise awareness and direct people to the website. A Facebook page shouldn't and can't replace the website. (but not many people will search for GCompris if they haven't seen that name before somewhere else which is a blog or fb (sadly) for an average teacher)

Yes, @jjazeix, this is still the brainstorming phase (that is why all the lists end with (...). Some of the proposals are short term, but many or long, very long or may never happen.

Enable a user-friendly forum for teachers, parents and kids?

2 questions there:

• What would be the aim? A "requests" board, teachers can share their views about GCompris, how they use it?

Yes, maybe "share their views and experience and ideas" to help other teachers/parents

• Who would do the maintenance?

There has been quite a bit of talk about updating KDE's forums and mailing lists to Discourse. I would suggest having it integrated into that when/if it happens. If this were the case, maintenance would be modding contents and little more, as keeping the Discourse instance up would be more the job of KDE sysadmins. Likewise starting a Matrix room on KDE's existing infrastructure: modding to keep out spammers and trolls and that's it. I wouldn't suggest going to the trouble of hosting a separate of a Discourse or Matrix instance just for GCompris.

We already have the same images bigger: https://gcompris.net/screenshots_qt/
We only display the small ones because we load all of them and the page is really big (note: this is something we need to change, it goes with a redesign).
And for countries with bad internet access, we can't load the bigger ones there, else it would take a lot of time to load the page.
So yes, we need to revamp this page to make it better :).

This is good to know. We will work on some mockups that respect the existing content and share them with you.

Create a style guide to help with graphic design tasks

We already have one for the application ( https://gcompris.net/wiki/Artwork_guidelines ).

.... re-doing screenshots. The ones you have are tiny! And some, I think, are old.

As Johnny said, the size is on purpose small to not make the page too heavy to load. One thing we can do is make the screenshots clickable to load the large size version from https://gcompris.net/screenshots_qt/large/

About redoing them, yes it is on my todolist for before the release, but I'll do it just before the release as I keep updating some activities look in the meantime.

My two cents: if you want to display a bigger image on the website and want a fast loading time. Look at https://squoosh.app/ or a cli tools for mozjpeg. You can easily reduce the size of an image by 90% while making it just a bit smaller and losing almost nothing in term of quality.

For images, I already made several tests and optimization rounds. I really prefer to not use jpeg as I personnally always see the quality difference. Especially with the kind of images we have (mostly solid colors), using png with a combination of pngquant and optipng is already reducing a lot the size, most of the time smaller than same quality jpeg.

(Note: I just tested squoosh, and I confirm that to make for example https://gcompris.net/screenshots_qt/small/advanced_colors.png just 5% smaller, I need to set quality to 85%, which already looks very bad compared to the optimized png).
(Note2: our large images on the server are not optimized yet as we don't use them anyway, but I tested to optimize https://gcompris.net/screenshots_qt/large/advanced_colors.png , and got it reduced to 129,2Kio. If I pass it then in sqoosh, it needs quality down to 80% for just 6% smaller file size, and the quality loss is already visible).

In T13711#241767, @paulb wrote:

Do you have stats of the site? Do we know how people navigate the site? How many people download from the site versus get GCompris from elsewhere?

I just took a look at the server stats, I prefer not to put all the numbers here publicly, but I can share some info:

-On average, I would say more than 95% of Windows users get the installer from our website, others from the windows store.
-On Android, it's the opposite (majority download from the play store, others download an apk from our website... And I don't know the numbers from F-Droid)
-On GNU/Linux, of course I don't have the numbers of install from distribution's packages/flatpak/snap, so it's hard to compare, but I think the majority gets it from their distribution's packages.

Also, interesting numbers: it appears that around 70% of visitors download the software from our website, which is a very good ratio (adding to that the part downloading from stores and package managers, there's only a little proportion who just visit the website without installing the software). And each visitor visits on average 4 pages, which is a pretty good stat telling that most visitors stay on the website long enough.

About the platforms used, from what I can tell, the big majority is using Windows, then Android, then GNU/Linux, and finally macOS. Again as we don't have the total numbers for GNU/Linux, it could be actually much higher (especially knowing some schools in parts of the world use exclusively this platform and GCompris).

Would you be okay with me posting about GCompris to a hungarian digital learning group where people (including me) share free teaching and. learning resources?

In T13711#241909, @aronkvh wrote:

Would you be okay with me posting about GCompris to a hungarian digital learning group where people (including me) share free teaching and. learning resources?

Yes, of course!

Hi,
Just to clarify what I said about social media, as it seems it was not interpreted correctly:
I never said I do not want to use them at all, as you can see I do use them to communicate on GCompris (I even created a facebook account JUST to be able to manage our facebook page).

I just said I prefer to limit the amount of stuff we post there, and generally post things that will bring users to the website, and not make them wait for info coming only from facebook.

Yes, I understand. That is the policy for general KDE stuff we post to social media: we give a brief headline and immediately link elsewhere, generally to one of KDE's sites. We are on the same page about this, @timotheegiet.

@paulb Thanks, perfect then :)

"Made by KDE" added in the website footer, linking to edu.kde.org (which is probably more relevant than kde.org for our users).

In T13711#242808, @timotheegiet wrote:

"Made by KDE" added in the website footer, linking to edu.kde.org (which is probably more relevant than kde.org for our users).

Thanks!

I would like to point out that that is not the best place to put it though, as not many people are going to see it down there because not many people scroll down to the bottom of any page. This kind of goes against the point of "branding". But better there than nowhere of course.

My recommendation would be to move the language selector along, nearer to "Contribute" and to put "Made by KDE" on the right. near the right border of the page.

Also can I ask you to point the slug at https://kde.org for the time being? The web page you are pointing to does not contain much useful information and looks very old-fashioned.

Well as we discussed on irc, I also have reasons why I prefer to keep this in the footer, and keep the language selector which is highly important for users in the very visible and usual top right corner (it is the most common place to find a language selector in websites).

For the link, ok I can change that to kde.org, until the kde4kids page is ready.

We could speak about the fact that GCompris is supporting many languages. This includs regional langages (catalan, breton, malayalam) that would not interest global e-learning platforms.
This is possible as local user becomes actors of GCompris.

In T13711#242921, @echarruau wrote:

We could speak about the fact that GCompris is supporting many languages. This includs regional langages (catalan, breton, malayalam) that would not interest global e-learning platforms.

Note that while Breton is more a historical/"dead" language, and Catalan is "alive" but apparently not the only official language, Malayalam is the only official language of the state where it is spoken ;) (so not to put in the same group...).

Regardless of status of languages, the fact that GCompris supports so many is, I think, an element that we should promote, yes.

That for sure!
Though, we should wait just before the release to make sure of the actual number of languages that will be included (sadly a lot of translations have dropped too much and have not very active translators, so we may have less languages in 1.0 than in 0.97... let's see).

2 posts every week on all social media platforms

Day	Post	Example
Tuesday	An interactive post using data from Gcompris	Use Music Instrument and ask them to guess it and directing them to GCompris for more activities like this
Thursday	Posts on educational Facts
Events	Posts on days which celebrate topics related to education	Celebrating World Braille Day and informing about the activities in GCompris

I almost forgot about this idea but this is important: Find a better title for the Playstore page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.gcompris.full&hl=en_US&gl=US

Currently it's "Children Educational Game Full". It could be named "GCompris: Educational Activities for Children" or something similar, as it's more descriptive and better sounding, while at the same time it shows GCompris in the title. @timotheegiet

Currently it's "Children Educational Game Full"

Good point. Without a proper name it sounds like some off-brand toothpaste: "Clean teeth white mint"

It was at first GCompris, but previous maintainer set it to this because, if "educational game" was not in the title the search never gave GCompris as result.
Now that we have reached a bigger count of downloads, maybe it will be more visible.
"full" was due to the fact that there were 2 versions at some point, we can remove it too, now that we have removed the other version

In T13711#251638, @Guilhermems wrote:

I almost forgot about this idea but this is important: Find a better title for the Playstore page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.gcompris.full&hl=en_US&gl=US

Currently it's "Children Educational Game Full". It could be named "GCompris: Educational Activities for Children" or something similar, as it's more descriptive and better sounding, while at the same time it shows GCompris in the title. @timotheegiet

Yes, I planned to do this for this release ;) so it will be changed as soon as the release is validated on the store.