[Web Comm] greetings (and other stuff)

[Jason Birch]

Jody, I saw your IRC comment; I'm a bit lost too ;)  I keep sending emails and doing stuff without feedback.  I'm just waiting for a brick to land on my head.  If that happens, I'm going to blame Frank for his infectious impatience :)
 
Working within the CN framework takes a bit of getting used to.  It picks up html pages and parses them into the centre of the layout.  I need to set up something locally so that I have a better idea of what it's going to look like before I commit.
 
Something I have been thinking about is how the site should be focussed.  The About the Foundation page is pretty structured and boring.  This is OK (it's a foundation) but I think that we need to look at what the purpose of the site is.  Apart from being a portal to the projects, we also need to get our visitors excited about open source geospatial tools.  Some things that I think could help with this would be some nice colourful screenshots, "success stories", blurbs on each of the associated projects, maybe some "up close and personal with" type bio info on the board members...   
 
It might be a good idea to identify who our visitors will be, and then put together mini-sites for each of the user groups, with individualised content.  ESRI does this fairly well on their main page in the GIS: Getting Started area.  We may also want to have an alternate access point, like:  "What are you interested in?" (desktop GIS, web mapping, geoprocessing, free data, etc).  So, "Browse by User" and "Browse by Use" sections.  Proprietary vendors appear to like selling by industry.  In some ways, they're on the right track, but we don't want to get too fine-grained on this.  Maybe just Education / Government / Commerce for "Browse by Sector"
 
Find out what Open Source Geospatial can do for you!
Who are you?
  - Executive
  - Geospatial professional
  - IT professional
  - Teacher
Where do you work?
  - Education
  - Government
  - Commerce
What do you need?
  - Desktop GIS
  - Web Mapping
  - Application Integration
  - Free Data
 
We should also investigate whether there are any blog-like capabilities within CN; I would like a news system that takes care of itself.  Haven't played around with the "Announce" feature yet.  That would be cool, especially if it would post to a section of the site, and send an email to osgeo-announce at the same time.  Especially especially if we could manually or automatically expire announcements.
 
I'm looking forward to a time where we can define a better set of styles and layout.  Daniel is the only one with access to the "look" section of the site (including the left nav) right now, so I don't have a good idea of what we can do with visual layout without breaking CN yet.  Currently, there is no visual differentiation between the <h#> tags or bold text, the line spacing is too tight, and the colour scheme is a bit plain.  Of course, if we're going to be an international organisation, we can't use any colours: http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/a/bl_colorculture.htm :)  I was thinking that we would wait for the logo contest before moving ahead with design though, so we could build the site identity around the logo.  We will need to activate a discuss list for this, and put together some web space where we can mock up various layouts.
 
I know that this is a new group, and if anyone has taken offence I apologize for charging ahead.  I can feel the pressure building behind us though.  We are responsible for what is currently the most visible part of the foundation, and lots of stuff needs to be communicated.
 
Jason

________________________________

From: Jody Garnett [mailto:jgarnett at refractions.net]
Sent: Thu 2006-03-02 8:43 AM
To: dev at webcommittee.osgeo.org
Subject: [Web Comm] greetings



Hi everyone,

I am the confluence hack for geotools and will want to suffer through
whatever CSS definitions we come up with. I have a bit of graphics
design behind me, and tend to draw
icons when burnt out ;-)

I mostly plan to be involved in the Mid term according the wiki.

Jody