Hi Anoop: I'm sorry to see that you haven't had much feedback so far! I'll try to get the ball rolling.
On 5 November 2010 13:00, Anoop Atre <anoop.a...@mnsu.edu> wrote: > Hi everyone, > An announcement to the list detailing the work of the Evergreen > Communication Committee and its Website Interest Group was sent out early > October. We promised that both of these groups would be seeking feedback > from the community. As promised, the Website Interest Group (WIG) is > interested in your thoughts about and ideas for the Evergreen website. > > WIG has started the brainstorming and planning process for the long-term > vision for the Evergreen website. We're looking for community feedback on > our strategic plan and requirements. Our first draft is below and we'd like > to know what the community wants to see in the Evergreen website. > Suggestions for things that should be added, taken away or changed in our > initial list of ideas are most welcome. At a very low-level, I'm not sure whether these requirements allow for multiple web sites. "an easy-to-use, comprehensive portal" suggests one Web site to rule them all, which would be (in my opinion) a mistake. For example, I would argue that our adoption of Launchpad, perhaps in combination with the wiki, is "a mechanism for Evergreen users to share development plans, co-sponsor development projects, and submit development requests and bug reports", and it would seem to me to be a huge waste of resources to try to recreate it. Hmm. When you list strategic goals for the Web site, I pretty much immediately wonder whether these are aligned with the community's strategic goals (and then I hate myself for thinking like an administrator, but that's a different issue). WIG could adopt the draft as working strategic goals, but if we think we have an overall mission for Evergreen, that should be front and centre on the landing page of http://evergreen-ils.org/ shouldn't it? Taking that approach, the mission for Evergreen on the development side, since at least 2006, is that it be "stable, robust, flexible, secure, and user-friendly". Perhaps we need a separate discussion to tease out an overall mission for Evergreen. I think that we could and should drop some of the oblique terminology where possible, as this would help drive out requirements and/or steps to take to address certain goals. For example, if "Strategic Goal #3: Facilitate development of multi-faceted support network for Evergreen users." really means "Reduce Evergreen's reliance on Equinox for the bulk of its development and support needs", it seems like this overlaps with "Strategic Goal #2: Encourage growth of a healthy developer community" ... and in either case, rather than jumping directly to "What do we need to do with the Web site to achieve this goal?", it might be better answered by steps such as "Hire developers locally, give them training and time to develop their Evergreen-specific skills, and set an expectation that they will participate in the Evergreen development community" and perhaps "Get Evergreen packaged in Linux distributions so that it will be much more accessible to a broader audience of potential developers", as just some initial thoughts. "Provide technical information needed by current and future Evergreen developers" identifies a broad gap that's much more than just the Web site in scope; it's really "Produce more entry-level developer documentation, training, and sample code" (some of which will probably live on the Web site, but a lot of writing and curriculum development needs to happen before the Web site needs to get involved). On a similar angle, "Strategic Goal #4: Encourage widespread adoption of Evergreen by the library community worldwide." may be an implicit goal for the community, for which the Web site could take tactical steps (for example, "Web pages should be able to be translated and maintained in sync across all languages") vs. non-Web site tactics such as advocacy requirements ("Send Evergreen community members to international library conferences in exotic locations to spread the word about Evergreen" -- okay, more realistically, dent and tweet and blog -- or even more importantly -- create a great stable, robust, flexible, secure, and user-friendly library system and provide excellent, up-to-date documentation for it) and development requirements ("Support right-to-left languages", "Add internationalization support to pages developed using Template::Toolkit") and community requirements ("Find an internationalization coordinator"). But listing that as a strategic goal for the Web site itself seems like it's over-reaching. That might be the primary thing that bothers me about a fragmented approach like this: rather than starting with a general discussion about a problem the community has, and what steps we can take to tackle those problems on various fronts, and who can actually do the work required to tackle those problems, starting from the perspective of just one particular Interest Group skews the discussion significantly. Of course, we can talk about goals and requirements and tactics, but I think we would all agree that the current Web site could use some love, and I know the WIG wants to give it some love, but ultimately it takes people doing work to make a tangible difference. So could I suggest a parallel approach (assuming that there will be some other discussion about community-level goals and challenges)? Could WIG be redefined to mean "Web site Implementation Group", and start by finding one concrete gap between our community's needs for a website and our current Web presence that you think needs to be tackled (perhaps drawn from the current draft list of goals/requirements), discuss that particular gap that you want to tackle with possible solutions in more detail on the mailing list, and then actually tackle the problem (perhaps in a few different ways, depending on how much effort is required), inviting feedback while the solution to that problem gets developed?
