Hi all, We had a 2-hour face-to-face meeting last week so I could get educated on all of the issues that touch website content. Find what I learned below. (I will setup a conference call for all of us to meet when Alysson returns from vacation, so you know I haven't forgotten about that request.)
Attendees: Jim Grisanzio Derek Cicero Bonnie Corwin (first 1/2) Michelle Olson Bill Rushmore Eric Boutilier (first 1/2) Agenda: 0. OpenSolaris web site application 1. Splash pages for launch 2. Poll data, wiki, and re-structuring communities 3. Navigation 4. Best Practices 5. Submit Content Notes: 0. OpenSolaris web site application The last version upgrade to the OpenSolaris web application (webapp) was delivered in Nov. 2006, to v.1.82. Since that time, we've been keeping the lights on and integrating new components based on the priorities for new things like bugzilla, polling, code review, and the effort to open source the web application code. We are about two months away from being ready to upgrade the webapp to v1.91. This has a new version of jive and some other goodies that we need in order to be fully up-to-date. 1. Splash pages for launch I put this on agenda to enable any residual feedback to come out and to ask if the portals were going to translate the new pages. Jim felt that because the splash pages are temporary and because there is a lot of planning happening for new site infrastructure to handle localization, we should not begin an effort to have the splash page content translated by the portals. We did agree to let the splash pages 'soak' for two months, so we'll revisit those on July 5th. Infrastructure for the portals is a non-trivial project, so we start with requirements, here is a beginning: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/portals/portals-v2/ We tried not to spend too much time on this topic, but it was hard. It is a huge topic with many issues. Jim and Alan are leading this up with our G11n partner engineers and we'll communicate more as we know it. 2. Poll data, wiki, and re-structuring communities I had this on agenda because the voting members of OSOL put addition of a wiki as 5th priority in 2007 poll and 4th in priority in the 2008 poll. Re-organization of communities and projects also ranked 4th in 07 poll. The OGB started discussing re-organization of the communities and projects at yesterday's meeting. Watch ogb-discuss for more on that coming later this week. The discussion of a wiki for the website content meeting was declared out-of-scope because we didn't have the right people on the call, so we didn't pursue it. But, I went back through the mail on the topic from last year and put together a requirements candidate summary page here: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/website/wiki_requirements/ To be sure, the wiki/CMS need still exists, I'll report out when I get time with the folks who are just now picking up the evaluation based on the requirements gathering we did last year. 3. Navigation Navigation of the web site is an issue that has two components, taxonomy and editorial. Taxonomy is the site map and two forms of navigation (left-navigation bar and upper-right icons). Editorial is how we pull-through links to components in running text or in banner adds on the right side. Omniture data can inform us a great deal about where people go on the site. But, it can't tell us much about how they get there. I agreed to pour over the omniture data for the site in preparation for preparing studies (usability/feasibility) on the navigation elements. In parallel to reviewing the statistics, I'll begin an audit and reviews of the common pages of the site using website-discuss list. You'll soon see review requests from me starting with the Roadmap, Site Guidelines, About, FAQs and then all the pages on this list: http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Website_Editorial_Board This morning, Bonnie updated the Roadmap here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/roadmap/ 4. Best Practices Related to the topic of editorial functions of the site, we talked about crafting some best practices for communities and projects to improve the usability of their areas of the site. My opinion is that using the 4 buckets for each project or community (learn more, find help, get source, participate), like we did with the splash page, could go a long way toward improving and making a more consistent user experience. I've done this with the docs community and I think it helps, but I'm open to ideas about best practices beyond this, and I think I'm on the hook to produce something along those lines and do some outreach to projects and communities to implement. 5. Submit Content Just as a final masochistic self-flogging, I broached the subject of a 'submit content' button. This is a bad idea on so many levels because it doesn't scale and would be impossible to manage properly and it thwarts a number of other processes we already have in place for contributions of code, docs, etc. However, it was suggested that possibly user profile pages could be altered to allow members to upload content of their own, which didn't fit on a project or community. This could include pictures, podcasts, presentations, etc. Also, a couple of folks have mentioned brainstorm.ubuntu.com as a good way to manage a stream of submitted ideas, so maybe we could do something similar for our project in future. Thanks, Michelle _______________________________________________ website-discuss mailing list [email protected]
