idea: Contest and promoting Rev to the world (Sarah Reichelt)

[Marielle Lange]

>I'm also concerned that Revolution out of the box is not, as Dan put it,
>"seductive". Maybe these goals are not compatible?

Trying to sell revolution to educators (and meeting funders in 10 days to try to
convince them of supporting me in this endeavours), I share this concern.

I haven't tried too much to tell friends or colleagues that they should give a
try to revolution because that's *very* good for them is... simply because the
context is not right yet. I am not convinced that if they try, they will get a
good experience... and people who decided not to adopt a product usually have
no reason to try it again later on (except extensive word of mouth).  I tend to
only advertise revolution to friends and colleagues who mention they needed to
get a or b done but have been unable to find an easy solution to their problem.

There are repercusions. I have tried to obtain grants for projects with
revolutions in the past. My understanding was that funders were largelly
unimpressed with what they saw on the runtime revolution homepage (I am afraid,
funders -- be it academic funding bodies or bosses -- are not ready to spend 2
weeks or so learning a new scripting language, relying on completely unfamiliar
coding convention, not used in any other programming environment; funders don't
register to this list and get a taste of the wonderful community that has been
inspired by revolution; they make their decision on first impression and first
impression is generally so and so).

This is confirmed by recent feedback from new users. I supervise two students
that I put on revolution projects. Two weeks after their first hands-on
experience with revolution they are completely convinced of the value of
revolution (they claimed they would be giving away their java books to
charities as they will never need them again ;-) ). However they complained
that if the first week was not that easy... if they had been evaluating the
product rather than being involved in a summer project, they would probably not
have pushed any further.

I am certain Runtime Revolution have a great product... but they suffer from the
family size of their company; they don't have the advertising power of
macromedia (and as current users, he, we certainly prefer they put their money
on getting rid of bugs, isn't it). Because I believe in their product and find
stupid that after more than 3 years on the market, their limited popularity
(hopefully increasing) get so many persons miss out on this great product, I
ended up creating a wiki, a gallery to demonstrate stacks, give a more modern
look and feel to the teacher manual (http://tinyurl.com/b2amn), write a few
pages to explain educators why they should become interested in revolution,
encourage members of the revolution-education community to support me in my
endeavours.

I am not really interested in contributing to their income (I would prefer RRto
be free, like Hypercard was... but, honestly, the education price is very very
cheap for a software of that quality)... I care about my own interest. My
interest is to have the company live long and prosper because I want to be in a
position to use that great development environment as long as possible. I don't
want the Hypercard story to repeat. If I need to give a hand to help this
happen, I gladly do so.

Sorry, a bit too long too.
Marielle

Revolution in education - http://revolution.lexicall.org/wiki/