Khaled, I'll save the rhetoric and be blunt. You clearly have had more passion about Habari's design over the long term and of late than anyone else. Anything in this that reads like an attack is probably coming across more strenuously than I meant it, and it's not directed at you personally, but these specific ideas. Just to be clear.
You didn't understand the intent of the original request for the logo.
The original cabal wanted a bell (and the original bell-h logo attempts to look like an abstract bell) because it is a tool carried by a classic town crier; one who disseminates news.
Your intent to convey the purpose of Habari, which means "news", with a question mark was the same intent that the cabal was asking for with the bell. I am inferring that you did not understand this requested intent when you drew the bells, since your designs imply bells as musical instruments. You're right - musical bells don't make any sense for the logo of a blog software named "Habari". Crier bells are perhaps a weak inference to news too, but that was the thinking.
That said, and it seems others may have conveyed this as well, I think your rediscovered intent is true: The idea of the logo would be to convey the idea of the distribution of news -- answering the question, "What's up?"
My opinion is that the question mark glyph is far too generic to convey the intent of that single question. A question mark ends every question in our language. Its use as a logo is much too broad. It asks any question, including "Does this make me look fat?" and "Why am I even looking at this software when WordPress' logo looks so sexy?" The logo does not need to shout the product's raison d'être, but it also shouldn't be something you could swap out for an exclamation point on the basis of interpreting "news" as "News! Happening now!"
Besides that, if my opinion matters as much as the next guy's, the selected question mark looks to me like a steaming turd from the 60s pasted from a set of fonts from the discount bin at the stationery store.
Gluing it together with the Ha-ba-ri text accomplishes one thing that Habari absolutely needs to do with the logo in a refresh: Including the name.
Habari has had a handful of things printed/published that simply didn't have the name included because they asked for a logo and Habari provided exactly that. Novice mistake? Sure. Where were Habari's sensible print/web designers when this was being done? I dunno -- probably off complaining that the community wouldn't let them replace the logo with a simple captital letter "H" (note that this also accomplishes none of the above mentioned goals). My point here not being to call anyone out, just that the community misses the big picture way too often.
A pet peeve of mine: The name is "Habari" not "Ha-ba-ri", which might help non-Swahili people say the word the first time they see it, but ultimately leads to people writing "Ha-ba-ri" in comments and emails, which I admit is probably only annoying to me and doesn't happen too often. But every time they do... Ugh.
To be fair, I'll confess (again) to creating the original "bell-h" logo with absolutely no intent of keeping it forever or expecting that it was the best logo ever conceived. I would love to replace the logo with something better. But something decidedly, unarguably better.
So yeah, starting to really think hard about branding would be a great idea. As you say, branding isn't only a logo. It's also message. If the message was as elegant as the rest of Habari, that would be great. Sadly, I believe that nobody's got a correct enough, succinct enough message yet. I certainly don't have it yet.
I agree on your points about the web site. There's no real marketing going on there. Habari has collectively had a lot of great ideas on how to improve what is there, and simultaneously had virtually no effort put forward to implement them. You may disagree, but I believe this is a result of both a fear of community rejection and an imagined lack of empowerment to do anything.
This is one thing I really admire about your striking at the heart of the Habari marketing/branding problem. I get the feeling that when you're done tearing the thing down, assuming you have any energy left afterwards, you might actually do something. Am I right?
I'm not sure that anyone has solved the design-by-committee problem. I disagree with those who think that it can't be done. But I think the solution isn't obvious to us yet. I'm optimistic that someone will figure it out.
My suggestion? Elect a sub-group of people to huddle somewhere, create a plan, build something usable in a staging place, and then report back to the community for review. They take comments, re-huddle, and iterate until either everyone loves it, or there's no budging by one side or another. And at that point, the community defaults and uses what they've built.
My real issue with everything you've suggested so far, and you're not alone in this approach, is how insular the process is. People may be trying to collaborate to get this stuff done, but not in a meaningful way that I am privy to. There's a bunch of stuff in the wiki addressing many of your points, but nobody's really doing anything about those. Everyone else is putting their own, individual completed thoughts and ideas up for inspection, and ultimately, dismissal.
How can anyone reasonably expect their ideas to meet community approval if they work almost completely on their own? ...if they form no plan to involve the community other than letting them leave comments and not truly participate? I don't expect that to work unless the person is a staggering design and marketing genius and everyone just loves their output. Yeah, right.
What Habari can benefit from is a reasoned, dedicated voice for accumulating marketing and branding consensus from the community. I perceive the problem with Habari branding as significant enough to willingly grant some exclusive power to a sub-group just to get the job done so that they don't need to get subjective agreement from every last person. It doesn't even need to be that plan, just some plan to involve the community. Someone simply needs to step forward, start that work rolling, and hold participants accountable. That is how change can happen.
Documentation sucks. It's a weird paradox. You can't convince developers to write docs without direction because they know how it all works. But the users won't ask for the instructions they need because they won't use the software because it has no instructions. Aye de mi.
Nonetheless, inside the wiki itself there are ideas for organizing the documentation. They're pretty good, too. If someone can organize some volunteers to move things around, it'll get there. (No, I don't find the wikibot helpful.) In Habari's early days, committership was given out for maintaining the wiki. It's that important.
I think Habari is a great challenge in many aspects. There are so many ways in which Habari can improve. I would like to keep my personal investment in Habari's marketing effort to an advisory capacity. I would love to get my hands deep in it, but then I wouldn't be coding (not that I'm doing a lot of that these days anyway), and I think that's where I'm needed. Suffice to say that my expected effort here could have boiled down to this final paragraph:
I dislike the question mark for a number of reasons, though I agree with the premise of its creation, if not that it should be an actual question mark. You should check the wiki for existing thoughts on branding and marketing, which people simply don't know how to implement on their own. If this is going to be your crusade, and I think it should, then you should definitely organize some people to help you form a plan to get community consensus around your ideas, because you're never going to get it done alone.