OSGeo web de-escherisation (was Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Proposal to find an alternative to Collabnet)

[Jo Walsh]

dear all; as Jason B is on holiday right now, I'd like to offer a
(possibly warped) version of WebCom's perspective (I'm a new recruit),  
and "what is to be done" ideas that Tyler and I have been talking over. 
I'd like to suggest that this thread moves to the WebCom list - 
mailto:dev-subscribe at webcommittee.osgeo.org - contributions and
suggestions there would be warmly welcomed :)

Aaron wrote:
> > news is available via the News link on the sidebar, but what I'm  
> > getting at is there seems to be a confusing presentation and a lack  
> > of consistency, which ultimately will scare off fringe users /  
> > browsers / non-members. 
Allan wrote: 
> not. I think there's an overall gestalt view of OSGeo that we want to  
> present that is not being served by the current site.

There was "no one at the helm" of looking after the website for a
couple of months. WebCom fell into statis because no-one was keeping
it moving. Recently Jason Birch nobly volunteered to take on the chair
role, purged the committee, and it's experiencing a gradual revival.

Months ago, WebCom tried to recruit a volunteer news editor for 
www.osgeo.org , that fell on stony ground. I think it was too much to 
expect one person to do this alone - not much kudos or gratification 
in the task. Recently Frank and I volunteered to take on news editing, 
mostly because it's painful to see it not being done - not to see the 
reflection of all the great stuff that people in the OSGeo community 
are producing, on the public face. 

But getting news into the CN site is, from where I'm sitting, an arcane 
process, involving manual editing of HTML files that are spread across
a couple of different CVS and subversion repositories. There's no way
of previewing pages or preparing an editing workflow, at least not in
the default setup we've got running. CN optimally is a platform for managing
software production, not for collaboratively creating cool web pages.

Mpg wrote:
> does WebCom feel/understand that they have a mandate to go off and Make
> Something Happen, and (corrspondingly) are there people ready to sign up for
> such a task? 

In the short term; Jason has ideas for improving the look and feel of
what's there; http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/News_Queue represents
some amount of Frank's blood, sweat and tears trying to figure out what 
we've got set up, as a howto-guide for people who might want to help
out. There's a news_item at osgeo.org alias for anyone to contribute 
suggestions to, to keep some flow on the site. But yeah, this feels to
me like papering over the cracks a bit - not addressing what's needed.

It needs to be easier and less un-fun to get involved. Tools don't
magically make this happen, but they can sure help stop it happening. 
I appreciate the chance to separate out two halves of the OSGeo tools
discussion - "infrastructure" for projects on the one hand; on the other,
"community information" for the foundation, its members and local
chapters, so we can tell one another, and the outside world, what's going on.

One thing OSGeo is seriously missing is a sense of "membership"
reflected in the web presence. Members need profiles, a way of
identifying themselves and their allegiances, being contactable,
putting themselves on a map. This could be a good angle to think about
a "community site" from - become a registered member, become entitled
to freebies, be able to set up a local group/interest group portal. 
This could provide a way to start channeling into news, events,
activities, the stuff that it feels like the site is missing out on now. 
www.osgeo can become a "community portal" or whatever you'd call it,
can point to the project home sites, whether they stay on CN or on 
existing infrastructure or on something new that OSGeo would provide if
projects wanted that, it kind of doesn't matter that much.

There are specialist OSS platforms for doing that sort of thing -
http://www.civicspacelabs.com/ (drupal-based) comes to my mind
foremost - even the livejournal codebase could be used for this!
- and this is something that OSGeo could fundraise to support
development and maintenance of. Getting this to talk to an LDAP
repository, connecting to other OSGeo services, this could be
trickier, but we have plenty of people who could help sort this out. 

best hopes, 


jo