Clean up OpenSocial's web presence
From OpenSocial
Contents |
Overview
At the OpenSocial state of the union, I proposed that we spend some time cleaning up the opensocial web stie. Mark H. has agreed to drive this forward. As far as I'm concerned, anything at all is fair game. Here are some ideas to help us get going....
I happen to be partial to the Eclipse.org web site (http://www.eclipse.org/). There are several reasons for this: You can download eclispe right from the front page. This allows you to get what you want and get started. Now that we've broken the specs down into components, e.g. gadgets, social gadgets, et... let's make shindig available like that as well. While I like the membership stuff at Ning, it's just confusing. Not only is it because of the "spam members", but it's not clear if a person is a member of OpenSocial Foundation or not. And no one is using the discussion features of ning--we still use the google groups. And as much as I like the event feature, the spam users prevented us from leveraging that capability. Also, it's not really integrated well with the wiki. A couple of the ning folks mentioned there are some new features that may help, but overall, I think we've got a mess.
A couple of things to think about as we go forward:
- How do we integrate Shindig better. Make OpenSocial more consumeable.
- How do we integrate the wiki better and make it easy for people to find the information they need.
- What about the gadget repository? I'd like to make sure we can help people find the gadgets they want to try out.
- Information about containers, e.g. public keys, registration instructions etc...
Current Pain Point & Potential Solutions
Some current pain points with opensocial.org:
| Pain Point | Potential Solution | |
|---|---|---|
| Fake members (due to initial lack of moderation) | Member cleanup initiative (one-time task, Carlos has volunteered to assist) | TBD |
| Spam concerns (related to #1) | New tighter signup controls (including email verification and quiz) | TBD |
| Need for moderation controls | Ability to deputize community members to moderate membership, ability to turn on content controls. Could be responsibility of PR-Committee. (Of course, this means the PR-Committee will need to be cleaned up as well.) | TBD |
| Discussions happening on Google Groups | New SSO options coming soon, potential to enable network signup/sign in with a single ID (Google?) | TBD |
| Doesn't integrate easily with the Wiki | Similar to #4. May look to Atlassian to host the wiki. This could bring additional benefits, e.g. being able to host gadgets in the wiki, link to Jira for Shindig, et.... | TBD |
| General web presence feels fragmented across multiple sites | ur suggestion would be a "hub and spoke" approach, where opensocial.org remains a central hub that aggregates/links to additional OpenSocial properties (this becomes even more powerful if they all used the same signin system) | TBD |
Benefits of using Ning
It does make sense to use an OpenSocial container to host OpenSocial. This has some advantages that can be afforded to the community. However, we need to determine when Ning will be moving up to the latest version of OpenSocial (1.0). Being a release behind is probably OK, but we need to ensure there's a commitment to staying current.
- Ability to centralize the latest news from various OS properties in one place. This is already being done with the OS blog feed on the homepage, but other feeds/embeds could be added as well, so this becomes a master dashboard
- Ability for each OS community member to have a profile to shows off their information, affiliations and even favorite OS apps (that can be installed by URL onto their pages)
- Ability to use our "Events" feature (especially once spam controls are enabled)
- Ability to host live chat events with OS experts
- Ability to easily showcase (and aggregate) Photos and Videos from OS events around the world
Examples of what's possible with Ning
Example sites here
Inventory of Information
Here is just where we have information stored.
- Wiki
- blog
- Ning Network
- Groups
- OpenSocial Resources Google Code project (for the spec development)
- Shindig
- Office hours / IRC channel
- Other open source projects
What are the themes that we'd want to portray on a landing page, e.g. building gadgets, hosting a container, ... ?
Want to encourage use of scheduling/event mechanism in ning.
Next Steps
- New Ning network (Kyle)
- Invitation Only
- Member moderation
- Create new landing page (Kyle)
- experiment with this on the new network
- migrate this over to existing network as as stop gap
- Plan for migrating over to Confluence (Mark H.)
- Try to recruit people to help manage & maintain new site. (Mark W.)
Next meeting July 27. Target all of these items for completion by then.
