WebCom OSGeo Site Focus

This page is intended as a collaborative brainstorming effort in defining how the web site should be designed, and is intended to be based on the "who" developed in coordination with VisCom VisComTargets.


 * Question: what the heck is WHO? Ah something from the Visability Committee? Answer: Sorry; shouldn't have capitalized...

= Content =

The following content ideas are evaluated against the users in the next section:

Community Profiles
Definition: profiles of individuals active in open source geo

Assume this means profiles of community members? Is this different from Success Stories? Something like: [Community]

I'm thinking that yes, this is profiles of community members. Not just development community though, and certainly not project-specific. This should just be a profile of a person, talk about who they are, what they do, and how they relate to the community.

Project Profiles
Definition: These are single-page blurbs quickly introducting site visitors to each of the projects. They should be short and to the point, and follow a specific template. Things like "Capabilities", "Prerequisites", "Interfaces With", "License", "Description", and "Official Website". Maybe not lots of pretty screenshots, but at least a couple where appropriate.

Success Stories
Definition: these are big; need to show sucessful implementations

These may be very helpful if they show what the user did that was successful.

Because a lot of users have limited time, they will look for others who have been sucessful with the technology before them. The lack of this kind of implementation stories can really make it difficult to judge the applicability of a resource before fully evaluating the technology.

= Target =

Who *does* want to talk to us? We have some characters in mind, for each we have:
 * Sound Byte: who they are
 * Senario: what they are here for
 * Discussion: free form discussion
 * Intended Workflow: explicit pages they will navigate between

If at all posssible try and stay in character, it may not sound like much, but it really will help us provided the best experience possible.

Dave (Australian Capital Teriotory)

 * Sound Byte: Large Government
 * Senario: State Planning and Standardization

Discussion
Dave is checking out OSGEO after hearing good things during a recent visit by members of GeoConnections Canada. He is impressed with the public / private partnership represented by this government policy and wants some more information on how it is done.

One thing Dave would like to find is some good Australian Contracts to talk things over with. It is very hard for Dave to find out that he should be talking to Cameron as the entire website is set up around projects. He has found the GeoServer users map and tried contacting Sean from Adielade (Sean has not been involved for a few years but there was no indication on the user map).

Intended Workflow for Dave

 * 1) Clicks on the International Page
 * 2) Is pleased to see an Australian section and some contact information for developers in several projects including something called MapBuilder.
 * 3) He calls the number for Cameron and explains that he already has Maps built (in ArcSDE) and wants to share them them with people at the community level

Mary (Volunteer in Africa)

 * Sound Byte: Small (or Non) Government
 * Senerio: Local Planning

Discussion
Mary was the reciepient of recent UN donations of computer hardware, and ESRI training. All the trained staff have since been hired away and 60% of her remaining computers work (the power supplies keep failing). The ESRI software is running on a single copy of Windows XP that is pirated.

Mary does not have stable access to the internet, and is very interested in the donation of bandwidth by the european space agency. She would really like to send out WMS request via email for later delivery. She is very sohpesticated and hoping we can help her with the tools she needs.

Mary has contact information for Chris Holmes who was recently in the area. In a recent email he directed her to the site.

(If you need more background about this target audience please review [Miles Seminar

Intended Workflow for Mary

 * 1) Page 1: International: there are a few contacts in South Africa
 * 2) Page 2: Organization: she finds the contact information for those working at the European Space Agency and tries out their software for delayed data retrival
 * 3) Page 3: She then starts looking for software to deal with the image, she downloads uDig but due to file size the download is interrupted after 2 hours, after trying a couple more times her network cap is exhausted.
 * 4) page 4: She looks into the linx distribution and asks for one to be mailed to her (no way she can download a distrbution)
 * 5) It is a race to see if the software or data arrives first

Josh (Local Government)

 * Sound Byte: Local Government (municipality)
 * Senerio: Constituent and bizdev-focused web mapping

Discussion
Josh works for a municipal government, and is highly constrained by both staff time and budget. He has looked at open source geospatial before, but was unable to dedicate the time to figure out how the pieces fit together. Proprietary software was perceived as having a better c/b ratio because of the ease of implementation, consolidated documentation, and low ongoing maintenance effort. Josh has come back to see if OSGeo now allows someone who is not a guru to quickly install a basic stack and get on with providing high quality line-of-business solutions that are themselves easy to maintain. Josh is interested, but doesn't have much time to look. He wants big captions, a snazzy "show me" live demo, and a couple recommended stacks with quick Windows/IIS installations. Some documentation on how other local governments have implemented OSGeo would he icing on the cake.

Education (Got Answers)
We need to further quantify our role with respect to education. At the very least we need to help academics see what is being used, and collaborate on existing projects.

Sebastien (Graduate Student)

 * Sound Byte: Grad Student
 * Senario: is starting research into his thesis and wants a platform to base his work on.

Discussion
If we get Sebastien we actually keep him for a long period of time, but if we waste his time with process he will simply fork the code - a tricky balance.

A much more careful version of Sarah, will follow the same usage patterns but will also consult others and evaulate a project based on reputation (and possible future employment). May also be influenced by the possibility of working with other academics, a listing of research papers associated with the projects would go along way here.

Expected Workflow

 * 1) Page 1: ?

Sarah (Undergrad)

 * Sound Byte: Undergrad
 * Senario: Looking to have her homework done

Discussion
Recomendations:
 * she can check out our toolkits (and even read the source code looking for the answer)
 * her project is in a specific lanaguage, or against a specific file
 * We can be blunt about asking her to consider our projects for graduate student work
 * many projects (like uDig) have additional facilities that are open to academics

And what do they want :-)
 * Simple functional site, see jakarta
 * No flash, it wastes time
 * Want to find the right *project*
 * These people *will* arrive via web search, there is no way they would start from our home page...

Expected workflow for Sarah

 * 1) Page 1: Arrives via search at geotools graph module, this was found based on a description that included "java", "graph" "shortest path"
 * 2) Page 2: clicks on javadocs for algorithms
 * 3) Page 3: clicks on "source" to look at how it was done

Users - Solution Developer (Got Feature?)
These are GIS users, often with a problem to solve. How quickly can we help them solve their problem?

Peter (Hobbyist)

 * Sound Byte: Geo Hobbyist (User)
 * Scenario 1: Peter is just here to learn how to use the tools. He likes maps and has played with Google Earth and wants more, he wants to see something cool.
 * Scenario 2: Peter is into Geocaching. He wants to have tools to help with his hobby. Ultimately he wants to share these tools with his friends.

Discussion
Background: Geocaching is getting big and applications like google earth and hacks of google maps have raised the public awareness of maps and geocoded data. The curious and the motivated curious will be visiting the site.

Peter has just some basic knowledge and will need to learn GIS fundamentals. Peter will show up on some interesting looking mailing lists and ask some very basic questions, and we would like to have a FAQ to point him to (to prevent developers giving him flipent responces).

If we are nice to Peter he will turn into the kind of contributor we want and need, with the learning experience fresh in his mind he can help others and update documentation.

Our Goal is to turn Peter, based on his motivation and dedication, into key contributor to the foundation.

Recommendations
 * Need bare essentials to understand geospatial applications
 * Glossary of basic terms and references for learning
 * FAQ for beginners
 * Page for beginners
 * Page about Geocaching and point to applications and web sites to fulfill the need

Expected Workflow for Peter

 * 1) Web serach for "Geocaching" or "GeoCaching free" or "GPS Track Software"
 * 2) Will land on a page, preferabily one called "GeoCaching with free GPS Software"
 * 3) Peter will go through the tutorial downloading software that has one click installers
 * 4) Terms that are unfamiliar on the page will open up in a seperate FAQ window (or will have a popover for their definition)
 * 5) Peter gets stuck when installing the "geocaching" plug-in into uDig  (or qGIS)
 * 6) He will contact the article author directly (or the mailing list) asking for help
 * 7) He will be told to click on the definition for "plug-in", by which time he has already figured this out via online help
 * 8) Peter shows his friends and the process repeats

Humour: under a deludge of popularity the instructions page gets very detailed (and long), by which point Peter writes a quickstart and the process repeats with Peter answering the questions.

George (ESRI Professional)

 * User: ESRI Professional getting sick of status quo...
 * Senario: Told by a manager to look into what is going on?

Discussion
Here is the problem "George" just wants to know *what* to use, selection of components is a real problem here and we need to have some "certified" software stacks that he can try out, or write a memo on (ie "We should evaluate this stuff that I read works together").

Would be better politically if we can ask some of the members or commercial providers to cough up a CD that can run on windows

Recomendations:
 * Need to speak in terminology accessable to the target audience. Diagram of ESRI Architecture --> FOSS Architecture.

Constraints:
 * We lose points for linux distributions (sorry but true)
 * Not interested in open standards (yet), that is part of a long play against vendor lock-in that George's manager is trying to step out of.
 * George wants to see a feature list (aka answer the question what can I not do if I choose FOSS)
 * Needs to see product set he knows, compared to what we got
 * it ** will do us no good to talk about the benifits yet (cause George does not know what an SLD document is).

George wants a definitive "yes" or "no". Yes = we are ready for biz and we just stole ESRI's lunch money.

Desired Workflow for George

 * 1) Page 1: Starts on the OSGEO home page (that his manager sent him from our latest press release)
 * 2) Page 2: Will click on the AUTODESK link right away as that is a named brand he remembers from the 80s
 * 3) Page 3: Will click on a link for a pdf of "Feaure Comparison"

Lui (Open Standards Professional )

 * User: "Open Standards" GIS Professional
 * Senario: GIS Professional looking for cheap way to try out an open standards

Discussion
Recomendations:
 * Once again start with the big picture, this time focus on interactions between components
 * We are allowed to list the specificaitons (Lui did a web search to find us)
 * Video flash via wink (ie Show don't tell)
 * Expect each and every page to be "home", people arrive here via google and will not navigate the site, each page thus has to make obvious the story

Constraints:
 * we have at most two pages (clicks) to show a pretty picture and give them what they came for
 * it is very hard not to talk down here, we have a different set of technocati turf staked out - each with our own terms - we are both right but we need to speak the correct langauge.

Expected workflow for Lui

 * 1) Page 1 - Google hit centered around specificaiton (ie SLD), need a pretty picture or diagram so he knows that a) we got our act together about the SLD spec b) we can make it sing
 * 2) Page 2 - Clicks on a "product" page of one of the programs that does SLD (ie GeoServer SLD page)
 * 3) Page 3 - If Lui lasts this long it better be a demo that shows an SLD file hitting a live geoserver
 * 4) Page 4 - Off to the GeoServer site to sign up for mailing lists, and get to know the gang.

Developers - Solution Developers (Got Code?)
These users speak code

Chris (Geotools Hacker)

 * Sound Byte: established developer will be annoyed at any change that slows him down.
 * Senario: site change over, where did all my bookmarks go

Adrian

 * Sound Byte: starting out wants to know what is here and how/if it works
 * Senario: really wants to get working but cannot make sense of the documentation spread across 5 standards, three projects and apparently communicated via Zen.