Posted by lisarex on August 26, 2011 at 2:15pm
The Community and Support section on drupal.org needs some love (http://drupal.org/community)
Here's some ideas to improve the C&S section. Thoughts and suggestions welcome here and on the issues themselves... though it maybe be more cohesive to discuss here first!
- Remove 'Recent activity'... it's often full of people having problems and frustrations which isn't welcoming!
- Imagery or smiley photos from drupal events etc. A community is people! or a world map of Drupal meetups or events (pie in the sky!)
- Focus on what the community can do for you, and you can do for the community (as Leisa says, a list of channels isn't super helpful if you don't know where to start)
- Put the Community Spotlight in the spotlight! (and brainstorm ways to give this section more momentum...Issue: http://drupal.org/node/928962)
- Onboard contributors with the Getting Involved page by focusing their skills as a way they can help, rather than a list of jobs (issue started here, no one has commented....: http://drupal.org/node/1010262#comment-4854312)
Right now the barrier to entry is so high, most people don't get very far. - Also, adding Support (linked to the /support page) is probably a good idea (issue: http://drupal.org/node/1242094)
- Improve "member directory" linked from Community & Support page (issue: http://drupal.org/node/1078214)
- clean up Getting Involved guide content (Issue: http://drupal.org/node/1237414)
... what else are we missing?
PS. Leisa Reichelt spoke about the problems with the Community and Support page, and blogged about it, following her presentation at DrupalCon London. Well worth a read!
Comments
And of course I would want to
And of course I would want to usability test whatever ideas we come up with!
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http://about.me/lisarex
An idea! Possibly a total tangent
This is a sub-topic of the above, but I would like to expand on Specifics of how to actually project manage initiatives. Much of this stuff maybe obvious to you and not others!
Angie showed me this page "how to make d.o awesome" http://drupal.org/node/1006562
Good and yet we can also share PM info about how you can lead a project of volunteers.
I would love to take this up- I got to talk w Leisa and Angie
About it. And I would like to talk w Isabell too- since I was so inspired watching her w
Dcon.
Is that of any interest or is it too detailed for the scope of this road map?
definitely, project managing
definitely, project managing is a big part of getting things done.
Eliza411 created the issue "Create a project management area in the How to Get Involved Guide" http://drupal.org/node/1225918 and some start to content : http://groups.drupal.org/node/169714
It's good to know what is MISSING from the Getting Involved guide (the content gap analysis from the content audit hasn't really happened yet; although cleanup is ongoing)
So really folks ought to take a good look at the Getting Involved section to see what else is missing.
Re: the main landing page, Bojhan had some good suggestions in IRC which I've noted down.
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http://about.me/lisarex
Getting involved, and support
It's really interesting to see this discussion getting heated up, leisa asked a number of important strategy questions. Which I feel needs a separate discussion - and I am not involved enough to answer. While we are figuring out those questions I do think we need to start improving, even if its only to find answers to these questions.
We clearly need a content strategy to handle all the different topics that we want people to work on, I have created a few wireframes to explain how we could potentially solve the initial navigation to the right contribution area.
The first thing that occurred to me, is that our current "Community & Support" is trying to support two very different use cases. That of finding support for the problem you are having, and that of understanding the community and potentially getting involved. The reason its put together as far as I understood, is to avoid creating the perception that we have "Support". Sadly that last goal is not really communicated by the current solution either.
My proposal is to split up Community and Support, to basically move the information under http://drupal.org/support to a actual support page with search implemented as designed by mark and leisa. We can probably divert a little bit from this implementation, but I see no reason why this was not a good idea.
drupal.org/support
With a proper support page taken care of, we can create a more focused page on the community. The support landing page could also have a advertisement place, with the number of companies providing support racking up this would be a great way to make d.o more self sustaining.
Onto the community page, what about providing direction per topic? It is very common for opensource communities to center contribution around several topics. We do this as well in the Getting involved page, however the direction to these is among many other book pages.
I propose the following, we draw some attention to the "feeling" of the community with a picture or video showing the scale and passion. And center the other attention on the "top" topics of that moment and a short blurb on how to get involved and why.
drupal.org/community
I think its likely that with topics linked from here, we can remove the current "Getting involved" landing page. I did not find a home for the "community spotlight" section yet - but that might require more discussion too.
questions...
OK Bohjan is proposing to merge /community and /getting-involved
1) What the goals of either the pages?
2) What are people looking for if they land there?
3) What do behaviour do we want to encourage?
Do we know already?
Possible Answers...
1) To encourage people to feel welcomed and willing to find a place to be effective, contribute.
2) People are looking for other people. See faces, find a local group to connect with. What is happening RIGHT NOW. NEAR ME. RELEVANT TO ME. (Caps makes it more fun!)
3) To choose a local place to connect to, to sign up to go to an event, to see what kind of initiatives they can join.
4) Answer a specific question about the kind of thing they want to help on. (not general support)
More Questions:
Great start, Bojhan!
Although I feel that we will need more ideas to hash this out.
My comments about the prototype:
1. I am not sure why we have “How can we help you?”, “Get help with Drupal” and “Get help with Drupal.org website” and “Community Support” sections under “Drupal homepage”. They might be useful for someone who is new to Drupal but it would not add value to the thousands of existing users.
2. Similar thoughts about “Your Dashboard” section. It is going to be unintuitive to expect “Your Dashboard” to have information about “How to get involved” and spewing random “Topics”. Dashboard is a place where I track my activities and it personalizes the website for me – In that way, “Find local community” is fitting.
If I assume that this is not “Your Dashboard” and it is the “Community” page, I feel it is important to have:
a. Image/ Video from past camps, cons and everything in between (Agree to all of you)
b. How to get involved (Agree to Bojhan’s prototype)
c. Should have community spotlight with an IMAGE (on the sidebar B)
d. Should have a list of other resources (like IRC, Drupal Planet, etc) (on the sidebar B)
Although there is more thinking required about what should get preference – How to get involved or resources?
I suggest we go the traditional and a little bit lengthy way out and talk to users and figure out what they want rather than assuming. I would be happy to interview new and existing users.
Dharmesh Mistry
UX Researcher | Acquia,Inc.
@dcmistry If you could get
@dcmistry If you could get feedback from users that'd be great, but I am not sure what you want to research specifically? I am not sure if we are really going into this blind, the support section represent earlier work of mark and leisa and the community section "topics" is an idea that is in practice in many other opensource projects.
c,d. I am very concerned with cluttering this page, if we do wish to add other resources we need to be very careful how we design it so it doesn't end-up looking like the current community & support section. I do find, places such as the planet very hard to find nowadays.
@lisarex What do you feel the "getting involved" part should be like?
Bojhan...
What I mean by research is talk to new and existing users (contextual inquiry, may be!) and also do a competitive review as to how others in similar space try to solve this problem.
Good to know that we are developing based on Mark and Leisa's ideas. I am wondering if you have any design research documents from them regarding this? Also, when did they do this? In changing times, needs and expectations change.
Although it is good to know what other open source projects are doing, I don't agree that it is a good enough of reason for us to follow the suit.
About 1: Apologies for not being articulate. Let me try again. The "Drupal Homepage" prototype by you has different sections: “How can we help you?”, “Get help with Drupal” and “Get help with Drupal.org website” and “Community Support”. I am assuming this is the default homepage for all the users: everyone in the Drupal community spectrum - first time, intermediate and expert users. It seems like these sections are targeted to the new users and not adding any value to the existing intermediate and higher users. We should be able to find a balance. There I go, making the problem complex :)
About 2: Dashboard is a central repository for me. It is a one stop show to summarize what I have been doing or things I want to keep track of. But that is just me.
About c and d: Having unnecessary or redundant information is clutter. Having meaningful relevant information is not. Of course we don't want to add everything under the sun but we can also visually organize so that is not cluttered. It also goes back to the point of doing research and understanding what the user really wants. May be, they don't want c and d and want things which could not have thought about.
IMO, if we as UX professionals are redesigning, we should try to adhere to user centered design principles.
Hope this is making some sense :)
Dharmesh Mistry
UX Researcher | Acquia,Inc.
getting onto a roadmap
This has been a good thread where we've discussed process and method.
I'd like to summarize this thread and roll this into a roadmap we're proposing so we can focus our efforts to the best effect. I've left out analysis of the specific of changes or the mock-ups at this stage. Instead, I'm focusing on the process suggestions.
I'm doing my best here to represent each of the points expressed above, and I hope this is seen as balanced:
Lisa points out
- We should gather the number of related issues and threads dispersed throughout several initiatives. There has been some work initiated, and we could build off of the work done so far, and close out as many of the open issues.
- We should test and validate the work on an on-going basis.
Heather points out that there needs to be some structure as to how people can get involved, specifics. Possibly mentorship on project management for initiatives. (Lisa points out Eliza411s project management guide).
Bojhan then proposed some mockups, pointing out that we may have enough combined knowledge and also being able to see what is effective in other online communities.
Dharmesh proposes that we may need to do some more research, speaking to users.
- Also agrees that we could see how others in this space are solving this problem.
Conclusion:
We propose we collaborate and agree on a roadmap for the steps we'll take, including these tasks:
- Build off of the work done to-date. (Lisa has completed this research, gathering the content analysis).
- Use the results of Leisa's survey' to help inform' our goals or process
- Conduct a survey of new contributors. We will have to work on promoting this survey, I suggest we use IRC and Twitter. Any other means?
- Review best practices in other communities for models of how they do things.
What's NEXT?