[General] Portal Project: last feedback round

[Ted Leung]

Hi folks,

I think we've reached the point of having a good proposal for changes  
to the various web sites, which I will refer to as the portal for the  
rest of this message.

A big part of our effort has been to get a good taxonomy for the  
content in the portal.   We've done this by looking at how we are  
actually using the wiki and the various websites  
(www.osafoundation.org and the project landing/home pages).     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.   Some  
information from those project or group pages needs to be collected  
and presented to specific audiences for the portal (project  
contributors versus people new to Chandler versus the press, and so  
on).   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.   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>.

You can also see the home pages that Mimi has mocked up for the  
various areas.   The goal of these pages is to be jumping off points  
into the content of a particular area and to display current  
information about the status of an area.   The visual layout of these  
pages is designed to help portal consumers gain a high-level  
understanding of the structure of the project, and it's  
organization.   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focus, what information has gone out of date, and things that have  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.   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.

Please take some time to look at the page that I linked above.   This  
is the last round of feedback before we start implementing this  
design.   If we don't need to make any changes to the design then we  
will start to create some of the new wiki areas and migrate existing  
content and create new content where necessary.

Ted