Personas

Personas in MediaGoblin development (not to be confused with Mozilla Persona, formerly known as BrowserID) are a way to identify a specific target group of users via anthropomorphic goblins. This allows for a quick identification of a particular MediaGoblin user, e.g. in user stories.

Personas should never be regarded as the only way to identify users and MediaGoblin developers should take care when using them since they might drive new developers off (instead of encouraging them to contribute). However these personas do make development more fun which in turn can encourage more people to participate. Ideally when using these personas in an environment accessible to would-be-developers, they should always be accompanied by their titles (user group) for clarification, i.e. Gavroche the artist uploads a new SVG image.

Gavroche

Title (user group)

Artist

Bio

Gavroche is an independent artist living in a suburb of Paris, France. Gavroche creates audible, text, visual and moving pictures often under the CC-BY-SA license.

Gavroche is currently a GNOME3 user. Gavroche uses desktop applications such as

• Blender, for animations and VFX
• Shotwell/digiKam, for digital photo development
• GIMP, for photo editing
• Vim/Emacs/$EDITOR

Gavroche would like to be able to submit stuff directly from any of these applications, but he should not be required to launch any of them to be able to upload anything.

Shaquannah

Title (user group)

System administrator / sysadmin

Bio

Shaquannah lives in a castle upon a hill, surrounded by farms and fields where lowly, plebeian goblins live. Contrary to the stereotypical castle-dweller she does not rule over her poor, neighbouring goblins. She tries to help and support them by the only charitable way imaginable. She runs a MediaGoblin instance for them. Thanks to Shaquannah the famished goblins, who live off the lands surrounding her castle, can take pictures and videos on their spiffy, expensive smartphones and upload them to a MediaGoblin instance where they serve as a documentation, a proof, of the tyranny of the other castle-dwelling neighbour (a weird little goblin who goes by the nickname The government - probably because he's the big brother of some lucky goblin).

Shaquannah runs her MediaGoblin instance on a Debian based system. Shaquannah is able to write some code but she absolutely loves fiddling around with configurations and enabling this or that in the system (she goes all giddy when a small change from "false" to "true" allows for some breathtaking features that get her penniless neighbours to worship her all over again).

In her spare time, Shaquannah enjoys kicking people out of her castle... they're interfering with her highly artistic sysadmin work!

Spencer

Title (user group)

Visitor / website viewer / guest

Bio

Spencer lives in cyberspace. Does he have a home in meatspace? Nobody knows. His goal in life is to become a living, breathing goblin Google (his IRC handle is Goobln). To achieve this goal Spencer spends his entire day visiting all the websites he can find and memorizes its contents. He even visits the websites in different browsers just to be sure that the website developers don't serve up different content based on the user's browser.

Spencer's favorite browsers are Mozilla Firefox and Google Chromium (Chrome) because they make cyberspace a better home for him, but he also secretly enjoys checking how websites handle restricted browsers, e.g. how the website is presented in a standards in-compliant browser such as Internet Explorer, how the website is presented in a text based browser such as Lynx, and how responsive the website is by visiting it via the smallest smartphone he can get his hands on (because everybody knows smartphones and hands exist in cyberspace).

Websites that support all browsers score extra in Spencer's mental search engine ranking system.