[General] Portal Project: last feedback round

[Ted Leung]

On Jun 7, 2006, at 1:01 PM, Jared Rhine wrote:

> Thanks for the thinking and work that went into this proposal, Ted  
> and Mimi!
>
> Some wide-ranging comments are included below.  Overall, please  
> proceed!
>
> Ted Leung wrote:
>> I think we've reached the point of having a good proposal for  
>> changes to
>> the various web sites...
>
> Could you enumerate the list of sites intended to be changed?

www.osafoundation.org
wiki.osafoundation.org
chandler.osafoundation.org
cosmo.osafoundation.org
scooby.osafoundation.org

It's harder to say how the last 3 sites will change because they will  
be impacted by the branding exercise that will be starting up shortly.

>> The general workflow that we have observed is
>> that content is making its way into the wiki via the notes pages of
>> individuals.  As the content on those pages becomes more concrete, it
>> migrates to pages related to a project or to pages related to a
>> particular group.
>
> To what extent have you observed this happening vs official content  
> staying
> in the Journal areas?

Some contributors are diligent about migrating content, others are  
not.   Our goal is to encourage this workflow, both structurally, and  
perhaps via some automation.

>> By reorganizing the portal content around this workflow,
>> we hope to make it easier for portal consumers to differentiate  
>> between
>> official OSAF thinking and ideas which are still in rough form.
>
> Do consumers distinguish "official" vs "ideas" by how they  
> navigated to a
> resource or by looking at the page itself once there?  Is everything
> unofficial in the Notes area like it is in Journal today?  I'm not  
> clear how
> this specific idea is changing.

Officialness has to do with which area you are looking at.

>
>> To
>> make this more explicit we plan to have a number of areas in the  
>> portal,
>> corresponding to product and/or group pages.   You can see the  
>> areas and
>> their taxonomies at
>> <http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/WikiReTaxonomy>.
>
> The areas specifically are:
>
> (Appear to be top-level from the designs)
>
>     * ProductWikiArea
>     * EngineeringWikiArea
>     * PlanningWikiArea
>     * TeamsWikiArea
>     * NotesWikiArea
>
> (And other?)
>
>     * CommunityNotesWikiArea
>     * CommunityWikiArea
>     * EndUserWikiArea
>     * GetInvolvedWikiArea
>     * PressWikiArea
>
> Correct?  How does one navigate to the Press area?  The End User  
> Area looks
> interesting; might that be dominated by things like  
> chandler.osafoundation.org?

Correct.

Nav the the press area will be at  least from www.osafoundation.org,  
perhaps other of the landing pages

The End user area might be dominated by <product>.osafoundation.org,  
or might merge with those sites.  This is a litte open, but not bad.

>
> I would probably vote to simplify the left-hand nav by removing the
> Vision/Roadmap/Planning, in favor of a strong (possibly renamed)  
> "What's the
> system?" or perhaps shrinking to one item added to the top block.

We can deal with that when we get to the lens pages.

>> The status portion (right
>> column) of the pages is now sectioned into NEW, NOW, DEFERRED, and
>> ARCHIVE as a way of helping people to quickly understand the state  
>> of a
>> project or team.   A portal user will be able to see what tasks/ 
>> projects
>> are currently in focus, what information has gone out of date, and
>> things that have been deferred until later  We plan to use some wiki
>> automation to generate the status portions of these home pages.
>
> I have some concerns about the right hand nav making pages  
> difficult to view
> on smaller screens.  It'll probably work well enough on index pages  
> designed
> primarily as jump-off points, but perhaps interfere with the  
> reading of some
> long-winded documents.  From the page comps for the people detail  
> pages, the
> right-hand nav is present on that lower-level page.
>
> Is the intent then for the right-hand nav to be present on all pages
> throughout the wiki?  That should be technically possible.  I'd  
> like to see
> how it works out, but I'm not yet sure I'll like the results when done
> globally.  If we can keep an open mind about how that works out,  
> that'd be nice.

The right nav will not be present in the content pages, only the top  
level pages.

>
> It's also known that I have some concerns about the performance  
> impact of
> running lots of dynamic searches to form sections of the page (like  
> the
> right-hand nav); I will try to be creative and diligent about  
> trying to make
> the New/Now/Deferred thing work magically on the backend (query  
> caching or
> something).  If that fails, or time isn't available or the "source  
> data"
> (tagging, forms, keywords, whatever) is bad, the right-hand nav
> functionality has some risk to keep an eye one.

Agreed, and we will have to work on that.

>
> It appears that the Engineering and Planning areas share a right- 
> hand nav.
> Other areas have more specialized unique right-hand navs?  Is the  
> right-hand
> nav actually blocks, some of which are reused in different  
> combinations?

I think that's TBD.

>
> Both the right nav and the cross-link features, which are nice,  
> appear to
> rely heavily on editorship, pruning, regular updates, etc.  What  
> are the
> assumed workflows and supporting mechanisms envisioned to be  
> necessary to
> support this information design?  Will people just be able to  
> change the
> status on the leaf page and everything falls in to place.  I see  
> the 6 axes
> section near the top, which look pretty reasonable.  Are there other
> specific areas of the new site that need maintenance to work properly?

The ideal is to have status changed / tags applied and have  
everything fall into place.  The fallback from there is to have  
humans do the work

>
>> In addition to the area home pages, we will have specialized home  
>> pages,
>> like the wiki main page and the project landing/home pages, which  
>> will
>> assemble information that is aimed at particular audiences.
>
> Is this where the Press link comes in?  Are there any known areas  
> where
> cross-links are needed between the different types of sites?   
> Anything off
> an Area home page?

This is where the  Press link will come it.   Other crosslinking  
areas are landing pages to end user area.

>
> This section of the page:
> -----
> Things are roughly organized into 3 product areas:
>     * Ecosystem
>     * Scooby Web Calendar Plugin
>     * Cosmo CalDAV server
> -----
>
> Is this part of the site design?  Why Scooby "Plugin"?  There's  
> probably a
> desktop client in there somewhere, per the Planning overview page.

The terminology will be rationalized.

>
> I'd like to see more consistent capitalization of non-first words  
> in the
> leftnav.  "Mail lists" not "Mail Lists", continuing the "Get  
> involved" style
> that's already on there.

We can deal with this once we get started building/implementing.

>
> I like what I see and look forward to helping with implementation.  
> Nothing
> above seems to be any blocker on closing the last call.  Thanks for
> reviewing.  +1.

Thanks for the thorough read!

Ted