Community Site

Page for collecting thoughts and discussion for a community focused website. A less-formal web site presence that is not intended for outward communication, but for building/encouraging and interacting with OSGeo communities.

Use discussion page for chatter and detailed questions, add relevant points to the items below.

Goals

• Develop a simple site that engages the community
• Collect/share information between members
• To have a slightly more open site for contributions than primary outward-facing site

Platform & Boundaries

• Run using standard SAC-supported Drupal tools
• Use secondary server so tools are separate from main website
• Should not overlap main website functionality (it may ingest some) or take away from other efforts

Specific Functions

This list is more for showing the types of possibilities and is not meant as a comprehensive list of planned functionality. It is to give an idea of how the average user might interact with the site and its tools. Each tool will likely be on its own page or may be a block on the front page. The distinction isn't made here as it will vary. Some items may not be useful at all, let's discuss them...

• Blog feed - present most recent 5-10 blogs from Planet OSGeo
• Polls/surveys - for various informal purposes, gauging interest in ideas, taking snapshots of community
• Hosting documentation and files - e.g. front-end to educational material, presentation library
• Membership management tools - sign up as a member, join groups
• Ingest events and news listings from main server
• Additional community contributed news (less major), sorts of entries
• Community blogging site - for local chapters, other users
• Local Chapter tools - allowing people to join, vote on things, maintain records/files
• ...

Structure & Responsibilities

The site would be:

• Built on common tools
• Overseen by two or more volunteers
• Have a volunteer moderator for each section of the site
• Volunteer driven - no function would be implemented without a committed volunteer
• Used and kept up to date - volunteers would be responsible for keeping sections up to date

Negatively speaking, without the above structure the site should not be pursued.

Concerns

• Should be tied to plans/guidance from Marketing Committee
• Overlap with main website would distract - why isn't the main website for the "community"?
• Potential SAC support needed, keeping needs isolated, reduce low level help
• Keeping it active/relevant, may take away some volunteer energy which is really needed on the main website
• Waste of time... could be done on wiki
• ...