>----Original Message----- >From: W. Trevor King [mailto:[email protected]] >Sent: 02 April 2015 18:14 > >software-carpentry.org is build from this repo [1]. Instead of just linking >to an image, we probably want to be >badging sponsors with something that >folks can externally verify as being granted by us (see the existing stuff in >>[2]).
....right. I wasn't even aware of those badges. I think I have a number of points to make. I'm sorry if I come across stroppy; I'm feeling exasperated here, but that will pass, and it's intended to be constructive criticism - I think that this should be a learning experience for how SWC needs to work as it expands. Background: I attended a SWC course about a year ago, and greatly benefited. I wanted to contribute to the project, but I don't have the experience to instruct, and I live & work in too remote a location to be a non-expenses-paid helper. I do have a modicum of design sense, or so I think, so when the Comms group started up I thought "great, I can help out there". I browsed the issues list, and found "Creation of badge for sponsorship". The issue explained that we wanted to be able to provide a little bit of HTML to sponsors for use on their sites. Great, I thought, something nice and bite-sized that I can do. I responded to the issue, outlining what I intended, and got positive feedback on that. So I went ahead and produced a badge image, and asked for feedback in comms, and got it, and revised it. Great. Then nobody in comms seemed to know how to update the website, which seemed a bit odd, since surely the website is a comms thing? Never mind, it's all new. I asked on the -discuss list... which is where you all saw it. And then I was made aware of the existing SWC badges. At this point there are a number of issues: 1. The way that the badges link to a list of badge-holders is neat, but I'd have no idea how to implement a new one. No problem, I'll contribute the image, somebody else can spend five minutes making it work. 2. ...except, design-wise... had I known about the existing badges, I would have made something to harmonise with them rather than something entirely different (see https://github.com/swcarpentry/communications/pull/31/files) 3. ...but doing that would have been hard, because the repo only seems to have the bitmaps for the existing badges, and not any source files. I don't think I need to explain to this group why that's sub-optimal ;-) Hopefully the sources may still be on Greg's computer or something? So I feel that I've wasted a moderate amount of effort, which is vexing. There are three actions that I think should come out of this, only one of which is for me (others may, of course, disagree with any or all of these!): 1. Now that a number of sub-groups such as comms exist, some care needs to be taken about information getting to the places that it needs to be. This is a natural hurdle in any organisation as it expands, in that one can no longer assume that a volunteer knows everything else that is going on (or has gone on) in the project. 2. For this particular matter, for the moment, I shall submit a PR to the site repo with a slightly smaller version of my current Sponsor badge to go in the directory with the other badges, and assuming nobody objects to that I hope that somebody else will come along and contribute the code to go with it. 3. Finding these badges highlights the need to generate a style guide and a coherent visual concept for SWC. This has been brought home by the fact that the existing badges (http://software-carpentry.org/badges/) have a very different design language to this suggestion for a site redesign (https://github.com/swcarpentry/site/pull/913). Now that there are multiple people working on things that represent SWC, we need to make sure that we're working to the same overall theme. There's an existing Issue on this topic here: https://github.com/swcarpentry/communications/issues/24, so discussion should probably go there. Hope that's helpful rather than just ranty; apologies if not. Regards, Simon ----- We invite research leaders and ambitious early career researchers to join us in leading and driving research in key inter-disciplinary themes. Please see www.hw.ac.uk/researchleaders for further information and how to apply. Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity registered under charity number SC000278. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
