fedora.next in 2013 (and fedora web presence)

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 at 11:09:34PM +0100, Robert Mayr wrote:
> appreciated (unfortunately I can't follow all their meetings and I guess
> it's the same for others), and if we really will have the transition to
> fedora-next already for F21 we need to work on it ASAP.

I think it's safe to assume that Fedora.next-related change is happening.
What that will exactly look like is still open, but it should shape up more
over the next month. I'll work harder on keeping communication going so that
it's easier to follow without knowing the minutiae of each meeting.

In addition to the Fedora.next changes, I'd really like to see growth in the
web site as an active online center of the community. There are two basic
reasons...

First, we're losing our future audience. I'm as old school as anyone (at
least, as anyone who didn't grow up with a PDP-11) and I'm perfectly
comfortable with IRC and mailing lists, but if I think about every other
project or group I'm involved with online, my primary interaction is through
a web site. With Fedora, my primary interaction is my mail and IRC clients.
That works fine, give or take some warts, but it raises the bar for new
participants in a way that isn't related to raising the quality of
participation in any way. 

Second, it tends towards fragmentation and lack of a common experience.
Because everyone is on different mailing lists and not always on IRC or on
the same channels, and because we get to the various Fedora web sites we use
directly rather than through some common hub, it's really hard to feel like
you're plugged into what's going on unless you follow all of the things. The
Fedora Planet blog aggregator could be a start -- except not everyone blogs,
and most of what's going on isn't in blogs, and then we have so much
non-Fedora content there -- it just ends up being one of another of many
separate parts. That in turn means that initiatives which could be exciting
improvements to Fedora overall, like Badges and Fedora Magazine, end up just
being yet more isolated bits used only by the people directly involved in
those things.

What I'd like to see is something like this. (Those of you who are more
experienced in interaction design, I'm totally happy to have this refined.
I'm just throwing it out as a starting point.)

  The main brochure website is shown to users who aren't logged in. This
  branches off to Get Fedora, Docs, and Join Fedora pages.

  If you *are* logged in, though, you get a stream / feed / timeline view
  with current top conversations from hyperkitty across the project
  (customizable to some degree, of course), Fedora Magazine, and whatever
  other sources (including possibly a _curated_ version of the Planet feed).
  Badges, too -- either as a sidebar or integrated into the feed, or both.
  This should be useful for all of our community members, users and
  developers alike.

  From here, you could branch to hyperkitty for various discussions, to
  documentation, and to all of our web-based tools. (And from those, come
  back to the main page.)

The idea is to make a site where the main page is something everyone
benefits from visiting regularly, and to design all of the connections
around that. Does that make sense?


-- 
Matthew Miller    --   Fedora Project    --    <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>