[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen Web Site Strategy

[Dan Scott]

Hi Anoop:

I'm sorry to see that you haven't had much feedback so far! I'll try
to get the ball rolling.

On 5 November 2010 13:00, Anoop Atre <anoop.atre at mnsu.edu> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> An announcement to the list detailing the work of the Evergreen
> Communication Committee and its Website Interest Group was sent out early
> October. We promised that both of these groups would be seeking feedback
> from the community. As promised, the Website Interest Group (WIG) is
> interested in your thoughts about and ideas for the Evergreen website.
>
> WIG has started the brainstorming and planning process for the long-term
> vision for the Evergreen website. We're looking for community feedback on
> our strategic plan and requirements. Our first draft is below and we'd like
> to know what the community wants to see in the Evergreen website.
> Suggestions for things that should be added, taken away or changed in our
> initial list of ideas are most welcome.

At a very low-level, I'm not sure whether these requirements allow for
multiple web sites. "an easy-to-use, comprehensive portal" suggests
one Web site to rule them all, which would be (in my opinion) a
mistake. For example, I would argue that our adoption of Launchpad,
perhaps in combination with the wiki, is "a mechanism for Evergreen
users to share development plans, co-sponsor development projects, and
submit development requests and bug reports", and it would seem to me
to be a huge waste of resources to try to recreate it.

Hmm. When you list strategic goals for the Web site, I pretty much
immediately wonder whether these are aligned with the community's
strategic goals (and then I hate myself for thinking like an
administrator, but that's a different issue). WIG could adopt the
draft as working strategic goals, but if we think we have an overall
mission for Evergreen, that should be front and centre on the landing
page of http://evergreen-ils.org/ shouldn't it? Taking that approach,
the mission for Evergreen on the development side, since at least
2006, is that it be "stable, robust, flexible, secure, and
user-friendly". Perhaps we need a separate discussion to tease out an
overall mission for Evergreen.

I think that we could and should drop some of the oblique terminology
where possible, as this would help drive out requirements and/or steps
to take to address certain goals. For example, if "Strategic Goal #3:
Facilitate development of multi-faceted support network for Evergreen
users." really means "Reduce Evergreen's reliance on Equinox for the
bulk of its development and support needs", it seems like this
overlaps with "Strategic Goal #2: Encourage growth of a healthy
developer community" ... and in either case, rather than jumping
directly to "What do we need to do with the Web site to achieve this
goal?", it might be better answered by steps such as "Hire developers
locally, give them training and time to develop their
Evergreen-specific skills, and set an expectation that they will
participate in the Evergreen development community" and perhaps "Get
Evergreen packaged in Linux distributions so that it will be much more
accessible to a broader audience of potential developers", as just
some initial thoughts.

"Provide technical information needed by current and future Evergreen
developers" identifies a broad gap that's much more than just the Web
site in scope; it's really "Produce more entry-level developer
documentation, training, and sample code" (some of which will probably
live on the Web site, but a lot of writing and curriculum development
needs to happen before the Web site needs to get involved).

On a similar angle, "Strategic Goal #4: Encourage widespread adoption
of Evergreen by the library community worldwide." may be an implicit
goal for the community, for which the Web site could take tactical
steps (for example, "Web pages should be able to be translated and
maintained in sync across all languages") vs. non-Web site tactics
such as advocacy requirements ("Send Evergreen community members to
international library conferences in exotic locations to spread the
word about Evergreen" -- okay, more realistically, dent and tweet and
blog -- or even more importantly -- create a great stable, robust,
flexible, secure, and user-friendly library system and provide
excellent, up-to-date documentation for it) and development
requirements ("Support right-to-left languages", "Add
internationalization support to pages developed using
Template::Toolkit") and community requirements ("Find an
internationalization coordinator"). But listing that as a strategic
goal for the Web site itself seems like it's over-reaching.

That might be the primary thing that bothers me about a fragmented
approach like this: rather than starting with a general discussion
about a problem the community has, and what steps we can take to
tackle those problems on various fronts, and who can actually do the
work required to tackle those problems, starting from the perspective
of just one particular Interest Group skews the discussion
significantly.

Of course, we can talk about goals and requirements and tactics, but I
think we would all agree that the current Web site could use some
love, and I know the WIG wants to give it some love, but ultimately it
takes people doing work to make a tangible difference. So could I
suggest a parallel approach (assuming that there will be some other
discussion about community-level goals and challenges)? Could WIG be
redefined to mean "Web site Implementation Group", and start by
finding one concrete gap between our community's needs for a website
and our current Web presence that you think needs to be tackled
(perhaps drawn from the current draft list of goals/requirements),
discuss that particular gap that you want to tackle with possible
solutions in more detail on the mailing list, and then actually tackle
the problem (perhaps in a few different ways, depending on how much
effort is required), inviting feedback while the solution to that
problem gets developed?