CACert?

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 02:24:08PM -0400, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> Are there others here who use or are interested in using CACert 
> certificates?  I'm a 150-point notary now, and if we get two others we 
> can churn out more notaries.  We also have the option of having a 
> keysigning event where CACert will lend temporary points.

I'm not sure I fully understand this email - or much of the Cert
creation process -- but I do know that a major barrier to me using
CACERT right now would be the lack of clear, concise description of what
the heck is going on on their website.

Their homepage has a set of news items -- with no explanation, and only
one line of text. 3-5 sentences for clarity there would go a long way.
Additionally, there is no other content there.

Howto information leads to several links, but again, no explanation.
Their Mission statement has no marketing speak - good - but not enough
content to convey in me any sense that the people behind the project
know what they're doing - bad.

Ah! http://www.cacert.org/index.php?id=19 is an extremely useful page!
Only found it under "Further Information" under the bottom right, of
course, but that's understandable -- but still doesn't answer the one
question I really have: can I use these certificates and not have my
clients in IE get an error message?

http://www.cacert.org/index.php?id=17 seems to indicate yes -- but
there's no information on that page.

Ugh, this hurts me to see something that looks like a relatively cool
project fall into the hands of complete mismanagement by people who
simply don't have the experience in getting their point across to the
general public. This is such a common problem in the Free and otherwise
Open world that I can't believe that no one has set out on a primer yet
on "how to market without being evil" or something similar.

Then again, I worked at a Marketing and Advertising firm for a year.
Although their tendancy for "All Flash is All Best"
(http://www.wedu.com/) did not rub off on me, I'd like to think at least
some of the communications skills they did use rubbed off an me, and let
me start with a basic way of communicating which others may have found
slightly more useful -- see http://crschmidt.net/formal/ and
http://crschmidt.net/ for some of that. 

Granted, I'll admit that my website is something that is designed more
to showcase some of the tools I've created rather than to act as a full
marketing tool for the work I'm trying to do, in part because over the
past couple weeks (during which I did a redesign) I have been so busy I
couldn't ask for more work. But at the same time, this is an example of
something that's at least a bit more informative. A series of links
(something I'm not entirely innocent of, see
http://crschmidt.net/semweb/ for an example) is not explanation for the
topics behind them, and to treat it as such is doing your userbase a
grave disservice.

However, it seems like an interesting project, and one I would like to
assist in. Does anyone know who to contact to get involved in their
website creation? It's very possible that it's run by people who aren't
English fluent, or people who simply don't have time to invest in it,
and I'm willing to put my time and money where my mouth is, given the
right contact point.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
http://crschmidt.net/