On Jul 11, 2008, at 22:03, John Plocher wrote: > Simon Phipps wrote: >> Why do we need to make this abstract classification? > > For navigation and organizational ease? > > As Jim pointed out, the "problem" with user groups today is that > they are > mixed in with all the other Projects on the Projects listing page. > One > reason for defining an abstract classification "User Group" is so that > we could have a page that listed all (and just) the User Groups. > > We could just make a soup. Make everything a group, and hope that > somehow > visitors and community members can/will derive navigation and > searching > and ... out of thin air. I don't believe that it would work, but > hey, I've > been wrong before.
That's fine from an operational perspective, and I agree to it - the web site should organise the "soup" that way in its front-page lists. For governance, we need a rational set of top-level groups with which the OGB can communicate. They need to be our "existing" top-level groups - ON, SFW, ARC, Advocacy etc. There need to be enough of them so that the "soup" is distributed across them without large concentrations under a single top-level group, and few enough to make regular reporting feasible. They can slowly change as the community slowly evolves. > > > If we are drawing lines around what we are doing today, we are doing > user groups, consolidations, Projects as well as various forms of > SIG/mailing lists. Forcing them all into a single "Group" umbrella > seems counterproductive... I'm not proposing using "Group" as the structural umbrella; we need a number (15-ish) of top level Groups for that. - "Group" is the class we are instantiating. - For governance purposes, the OGB will instantiate a set of top-level Groups. Those Groups will organise whichever other Groups they need to function, and so on. - For operational purposes, all Groups can relate to whichever other Groups make sense. - For website purposes, Groups can be listed in the sets that make the most sense for each page of the site. So your use case below can be accommodated. > > > Maybe some use-cases would help here: > > A user comes to the OS.o website. They wish to find out where > <something> is happening. Telling them "we have 300 things, one > of them might be what you are looking for - have fun searching, > navigating, whatever" is less than helpful. An alternative is > to say "we have User Groups (look over there), Development > Communities (over here) and a bunch of Projects that are sponsored > by the various Development Communities (thata way). In addition, > we have a bunch of discussion groups that span across these > boundaries (look here)". > > -John >
