Hi Everyone, [First of all, this is a warning -- this is a long post, and I would really appreciate it if you read through the whole thing first before posting a comment on any specific thing I say. What follows is more supposed to be read as a document, so please bear with me. :D] A couple of days ago I posted a question about who is managing the boost.org website and the current process by which the website is being generated/hosted. That discussion led to a few realizations for me that I am including in this proposal to address the relative "pain" required to maintain the current site and move forward. This post is a proposal is designed to address three key areas of the boost.org maintenance effort: * The toolchain requirements for building/generating the boost.org site. * Addressing the non-interactivity of the boost.org website and the related pages. * Per-library community/documentation management. First, a preamble: The boost.org website is meant to be the face of the Boost C++ Libraries. It should be the facade that communicates the quality and the high standard the the Boost development community hold dear as the differentiating factors that make Boost what it is. As the face of the community, the website should encourage: participation, collaboration, community building, and open communication. The website shall host all community-developed and enforced policies, all official communications from the Boost community to the world, and serve as an umbrella that shelters the libraries and communities that do become part of the Boost C++ Library effort. Next, let me outline a few broad things with specific points: Communication * We should make it easy for the whole boost community (boost.org) and individual library maintainers/community to communicate messages to the world at large in an easy, unobtrusive manner. * We should make communication a two-way process by encouraging participation (see Participation below). * We should strive to communicate more, instead of communicating less -- to do this we should make it part of the goal of those in the Boost community (not necessarily developers) to promote the libraries and the website itself. Participation * Let's encourage participation in the form of comments to blog posts, feedback on documentation pages, and discussions on specific topics/threads. * Let's make it easier for non-developers to contribute to the effort in the form of community building, providing support, and advocate the library. * We should use the boost.org website as a means of reaching out to and being one of the ways the open source community and industry at large can get in touch with: individual developers, library maintainers, or the Boost community (including users) at large. Collaboration * Let's add the boost.org website as an additional channel through which collaboration can occur as a complement to the boost-developers and boost-users mailing lists. * Let's foster a more community-driven way of solving problems without having to require everyone to be part of a central list. * Let's allow communities around Boost libraries to grow and get things done on the boost.org website. After all the "marketing" stuff above, I'll outline below the concrete steps I propose people allow me to do. Ultimately though there should be a means of measuring whether the steps I take would lead to an agreeable measure of success, so I point out some measures by which you may hold me accountable to getting done. I invite everyone to please comment on and discuss whether the steps/proposal makes sense and whether there is a better way you think I can achieve this in case you agree to my above statements. Step 1: Move static and not-so-static content over to Wordpress MU [0] The current boost.org website is composed of mostly static content that says things about the submission-review process, the guidelines for libraries, what the goal of the project is, and the like. These pages can be ported to Wordpress MU manually either by copy-pasting the content into the WYSIWYG editor or typing the content in (and editing it in the process). This step will include the establishment of who would be the administrators and the eventual maintainers of the boost.org facade. All the information regarding the Boost Community and the maintaining of the content that's specific to the boost.org website would be written, article submissions curated, and copy-edited by the administrators. I have personally volunteered to be one of these administrators who would basically act as an editor for the site. I would take on the responsibility of achieving the following (measurable) goals: 1. Establishing a "Feedback" button that allows anybody visiting the site to post feedback on whatever they think. I would prefer to use a service called Get Satisfaction [1] to gather and manage the feedback, as well as responding to feedback posted through that service. 2. Incorporating a DisQus [2] discussion system to manage comments on pages. There is already a Wordpress plugin for this and comment moderation would mostly be handled initially by me and other administrators interested in helping out in this effort. 3. Integrating and publishing regularly the Google Analytics and Wordpress MU stats on the whole site. Regularly can mean either monthly or weekly depending on who often the community wants information about the site. [0] http://mu.wordpress.org/ [1] http://getsatisfaction.com/ [2] http://disqus.com/ Step 2: Make it easy to jump from Wordpress MU to Trac for the Wiki, Tickets, and Source Viewer This would mean adding links to the appropriate pages in Trac, and in these pages a way to jump back to the boost.org website. This will require some changes in the Trac site which should be easy to pull off. The measurable outcome for this would be to see the actual integration done in a satisfactory manner. Satisfactory of course means, that it works. ;) Step 3: Set up blogs for individual libraries (who want it, or at least for library maintainers/volunteers who want to manage it) Ideally this should be done for all the libraries. Each sub-site would include (at the minimum): * A blog -- where only the maintainers and those nominated by the maintainers to have blog posting access can communicate what's happening, what's coming, whether they need help, or whether there are any nasty bugs that need attention (as well as just some general updates or cool findings regarding the library). * Static Pages -- typically there would be pages like "About", "History", "Examples", and "FAQs" which generally are mostly static. These can be edited by the maintainers and those nominated by the maintainers who would have access to these pages. * Support Information -- this would be a special static page which would point to Trac, or other places where the development and support system of the library is hosted. I am not excluding the possibility of having libraries developed in github/gitorious/sourceforge. Links to things like the mailing list on which the discussion happens, whether there's a web-based forum, or whether there's a number/company to call for support would generally go here too. * Online documentation -- as an absolute minimum there should be a page on documentation for each library in Boost accessible from the boost.org website. It would be a good thing to integrate the generated library documentation into the wordpress system itself, but at the minimum links to the generated library docs that are statically served (just like now) would be acceptable. My personal vision for boost.org would be to become the hub over which the Boost C++ community and the surrounding ecosystem of companies can join in on the action. I would even go so far as say that we should encourage and allow industry players that offer support for Boost libraries or who use Boost libraries to place advertising on the site to help with shouldering the cost of BoostCon, or other things that the Free Software Conservancy would deem necessary to spend money on. I also would like to see it be the face of the Boost community, and really a means to get users to start using boost, get excited about it, and eventually contribute back to the cause. Users who are already passionate about providing support for a wider audience of Boost users could also contribute to the cause not as library developers but people who publicize and liberally put links to the boost.org site on their blogs, on their email correspondence, and in stackoverflow.com answers. Ultimately I would personally want to see boost.org be able to handle the growth of the Boost C++ Library, and allow for more communities (not just one community) to through the site. I don't want it to replace the mailing list for Internet old timers like me who like this feel of email conversation, but for things like announcements and communicating to the wider audience I think the website should do that job superbly. Thanks for reading this far, comments, suggestions, reactions, and pledges to help would be greatly appreciated. Have a great day everyone and I hope to hear from you soon! -- Dean Michael Berris deanberris.com