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webteam:webplan:2011:section6_recommendations

1. People & Process

Creation of an Evergreen Advocate role

The Evergreen community has historically been composed largely of Evergreen developers (and other highly-technical people) and understandably led by those developers. As the software becomes used in libraries across the world, it's natural for the number of non-developers in the community to grow substantially. We're recommending the creation - either formally or informally - of an Evergreen Advocate role in the community. The objectives of Evergreen Advocates would be:

  • Provide leadership for, and representation of, non-developers in the Evergreen community
  • Promote the adoption of Evergreen in various library and consortia contexts (e.g., K-12)
  • Teach librarians and related personnel, both inside and outside the Evergreen community, about Evergreen via formal and informal documentation, webinars, in-person gatherings, and other venues as appropriate
  • Share resources, expertise, and opinions about Evergreen on the Evergreen website, the mailing list, and other venues as appropriate
  • Foster a strong sense of community spirit in the Evergreen community by using community building tools and skills, providing volunteer recognition, etc.
  • Encourage widespread participation in the Evergreen community by members, on the website, mailing lists, etc.

Creation of formal Evergreen Website Team

A community website platform that supports the needs of a diverse community and fosters the growth of that community is not something that can be built and then left to run on its own. We're recommending the formation of a formal Website Team, to be composed of self-selected community members, and reporting to the Governance Committee until a formal Evergreen organizational structure can be put in place. The twin primary goals of this Team would be to make short-term improvements to the website as well as plan long-term architecture improvement and maintenance operations. This Team would actively and regularly seek out feedback and suggestions for direction from Evergreen community constituencies, including the Communications Committee, the developer community, DIG, new users and potential users, etc. In addition, this team would be tasked with lowering any barriers to participation in the website and encouraging contributions from as many community members as possible. Finally, this team would coordinate a schedule of maintenance and management duties for volunteers (e.g., conducting periodic reviews of curated content, performing website software updates, running link scanning tools to detect old or broken links, etc.).

Creation of Website Policies

Until the Evergreen Foundation is formalized and intellectual property concerns are subsequently addressed, it would be wise to institute website-related policies as semi-formal community guidelines or terms of service. Specifically, the Website Planning Committee has recognized the need for:

  • An "intellectual property policy" governing the licensing of information contributed to the website, mailing lists, etc.
  • A "privacy policy" to advise community participants about electronic privacy, collection of personally-identifying data, retention of data, distribution of data, etc.
  • A "netiquette guideline" to promote civility and community spirit on the website, IRC and mailing lists

Active Publication of New Content

The new Website Team, working in conjunction with the Communications Committee and any interested Evergreen Advocates, should create and implement a schedule for regular publication of new Evergreen-related content on the website. For instance, once each week a blog entry about a specific Evergreen feature or case study could be published to the front page of the website.

Accessibility Advocate

In order to form an inclusive and diverse community welcoming all, we are recommending the creation of a formal Accessibility Advocate role, possibly as an adjunct to or within the Website Team. This role would strive to ensure that no groups of people are inadvertently barred from participating in the Evergreen community due to any reason such as visual, auditory, or motor skill impairment, language barriers, etc. We also recommend the creation of a similar role to actively participate in Evergreen software development features related to user experience.

2. Website Recommendations

A. Implementation of a Community Website Platform

The Web Team's primary technical recommendation is to replace the existing website with an integrated community website platform constructed using existing open source software and tools. An ideal community website platform would provide the following features:

1. Provide a content management system that encourages content contribution from the community while allowing strong editorial management

Many of the strategic goals and requirements defined during this process involve the need for a system allowing as many community members as possible to easily contribute content to the community: documentation, files, useful resources, discussion, etc. A modern community website platform would include easy-to-use, web-based content management tools for all community members to take advantage of.

At the same time, there is a need for the community website to be well-organized and for highly-relevant information to be curated to a prominent position, while deprecated information is archived or removed. A well-designed website platform would provide powerful editorial capabilities for the Evergreen Website Team defined in the People & Process Recommendations.

2. Provide collaboration tools that allow community members to work together

Like most communities, the EG community uses a combination of web-based development tools (software code and documentation repositories, development management, community wiki space), email (on various development and community-focused lists), and IRC (development, support, and community meetings). The Web Team has identified some additional opportunities for web-based community tools, such as standard online forums (for discussion and/or support), an idea percolator (a workflow for identifying potential collaborators), and a voluntary contact directory of Evergreen community members (individuals and organizations).

3. Provide a foundation for integrating third-party data, software, and services

There are a variety of requirements that involve interacting with third-party data, software, and services. Many of these requirements are fairly straightforward, e.g.:

  • allowing website visitors to easily post a link to the website to their Facebook profile
  • integrating website content and internal search with Google Analytics to help the Website Team gather data for continuous website improvement
  • aggregating Evergreen-related content from third-party websites via RSS or API, especially bug-tracking and development-management tools used by the developer community

A community website platform can include many of these features "out of the box" or via relatively easy modular integration.

Plan for implementing a new community website platform

1. Define project management team membership, responsibilities, and decision-making authority in a process that recognizes the importance of community input. Pragmatically, this might take the form of the Governance Committee formally chartering the Evergreen Website Team to plan and implement the new platform with input from the community at regular intervals and defined community stakeholder representatives. Since virtually all of the strategic planning has already been conducted and documented as part of our planning process, the Website Team would be able to proceed directly with relatively straightforward technical planning.

2. Select a community website platform. The Website Team will need to evaluate several community website platforms for their suitability, ease of implementation and customization, availability of support from community members, and other factors the Team deems necessary.

3. Define and prepare website development and production environments

4. Develop community website platform

a. Develop information architecture
b. Populate content as defined by information architecture, using existing website content where possible
c. Implement custom community and collaboration functionality using existing tools where possible
d. Implement a design theme that maximizes website user experience given the defined information architecture and functionality features
e. Implement stakeholder and community review process of completed website platform

5. Launch community website platform

a. declare new content freeze and user account freeze on existing website 
b. ensure content is synchronized on existing and new websites
c. launch new website, archiving existing website into a web-accessible archive indefinitely for future reference
d. begin community outreach activities to encourage membership and participation in new online community platform

B. Integrate off-site sites and features into new community website platform where appropriate

Benefits of centralization:

  • Single sign-on, single sign-in
  • Centralized search index encompassing all content
  • Easier analytics and statistics gathering
  • Easier to maintain consistent branding and visual treatment

1. RSCEL (Resource Sharing Cooperative of Evergreen Libraries - rscel.evergreen-ils.org)

Much of the content and functionality of the RSCEL site is aligned with the strategic goals and requirements defined during this process. Wherever possible, we recommend that this content and functionality be integrated into the new website just as the existing website content will be.

2. Docs (Official documentation DocBook site maintained by DIG - docs.evergreen-ils.org; unofficial documentation maintained via wiki and other website pages)

Currently, documentation is contributed via the git software version control tool to enforce version control; this method is not accessible for many non-developers and represents a barrier to widespread contribution. There are many solutions for content management that provide version control in a more user-friendly manner. If DIG elects to preserve the current method for contributing official documentation, we can instead encourage widespread participation in and contribution to the unofficial documentation set.

3. Community News Aggregator (Maintained by community member - planet.evergreen-ils.org)

As the Evergreen ecosystem continues to grow, relevant content will increasingly be found off-site. By integrating the community news aggregator functionality into the community website platform, off-site and on-site content can be associated in searches and collections of resources.

C. Develop content structure and curated content for targeted audience roles: potential implementer/decision-maker, migration center, system administrators

One of the key functionality requirements for the website is the ability for users to browse and search for content specifically targeted at their specific role. To properly satisfy this requirement, the following steps are recommended:

  • implement a categorization ("tagging") system that allows all content on the website to be optionally categorized based on intended audience
  • manually review as much content as possible and tag with audience tag(s)
  • provide browsing interface allowing users to view all resources with a specific audience tag
  • provide search interface field restricting searches to resources with a specific audience tag
  • create curated content collections (e.g., "Getting to Know Evergreen's Features" page linking to relevant resources for potential implementers)

D. Develop content structure and curated content for specific topics (circulation, documentation, translations)

One of the key functionality requirements for the website is the ability for users to browse and search for content based on a specific topic or keyword. To properly satisfy this requirement, the following steps are recommended:

  • implement a categorization ("tagging") system that allows all content on the website to be optionally categorized based on topic
  • manually review as much content as possible and tag with topic tag(s)
  • provide browsing interface allowing users to view all resources with a specific topic tag
  • provide search interface field restricting searches to resources with a specific topic tag
  • create curated content collections (e.g., "Migration Center" page linking to relevant resources for visitors seeking migration information)

E. Implement an up-to-date list of Evergreen features that is searchable, sortable, and categorized.

Lori Ayre is currently spearheading a team of community contributors working on a draft of this features list. The present incarnation is a Google Docs spreadsheet embedded in the EG wiki here:

http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=feature_list

F. Implement a searchable and browsable knowledge base to easily store highly-relevant and frequently-accessed Evergreen technical information

This knowledge base could be as complex as a dedicated knowledge management application or as simple as a dedicated set of wiki pages kept up-to-date and highlighted for website visitors.

During the website visitor survey, respondents were given a list of existing website sections/components and asked to identify those that they “most frequently” access. Unsurprisingly, the most commonly used sections of the site are the official documentation (produced by the Doc Interest Group), the unofficial documentation (produced by the community using the website's Dokuwiki functionality, and the mailing list archives. The Web Team had already identified these three content areas as containing almost the entire collective knowledge base of Evergreen.

These three areas - docs, wiki, and mailing list - can ideally be used as three different “tiers” or “phases” of collaboration and community knowledge management. For instance, a discussion about a particular problem or feature may take place on the mailing list, where it appears in the archives. Information that is deemed especially valuable in the mailing list archives might be moved by an enthusiastic website contributor into the unofficial documentation stored on the wiki. Documentation Interest Group members may then regularly review popular wiki pages to determine if they are suitable for inclusion in the “official” documentation where they would most likely be accessed by the largest number of potential users.

This is a type of knowledge management is a form of curation, by which people in different roles or contexts manually move knowledge from a limited discussion context into a context accessible to all on the website. However, website visitors increasingly rely on search, especially for finding specific information within a broad topic such as Evergreen. Therefore, it is critical that all identified information sources are incorporated into a search corpus and that end-user search tools on the site are able to return useful results to user queries. In addition, the website should be structured in a way that optimizes automated indexing by third parties such as Google. This will help ensure that the site is ranked as a valuable resource for those searching with off-site tools.

G. Implement a support forum as an alternative to the mailing list and IRC for user-to-user support

Evergreen users seeking community support currently use the mailing list and the IRC channel. Some users are more comfortable using a web-based interface for support interactions – or for finding relevant information in historical archives of those interactions. In addition, support forum posts would automatically be archived and indexed by the content management system and could take advantage of tagging/categorization, identity/profile connection, and other features not available to the web-based mailing list and IRC transcript archives.

H. Implement a "feature percolator" for collaborative development of feature/enhancement ideas

As a collaborative open source software project, the Evergreen community has a demonstrated history of organizations successfully working together to build software. The "feature percolator" application proposed by the Web Team would allow community members to submit their ideas to a community forum for collaborative discussion and development. In addition, community members participating in the discussion of each idea would be able to communicate their willingness, if any, to sponsor the development and implementation of that idea. This process is hoped to foster relationships between community members leading to greater collaboration and improvement of the Evergreen software.

I. Implement personalization tools on the website to increase effectiveness

Because many EG community members perform multiple roles in their EG deployment, and because of the increase of content related to EG, we recommend the implementation of website personalization tools to help increase visitors' effective use of the website. These tools could include:

  • a "favorite" tool to allow registered visitors to bookmark certain pages within the site
  • a rating tool which would allow registered visitors to rate the usefulness of certain pages, thereby showing the most popular or helpful pages
  • a notification mechanism to allow registered visitors to sign up for email notifications of new content matching certain criteria
  • a way to focus the display of website content on a visitor's criteria, such as audience target or category

Files

webteam/webplan/2011/section6_recommendations.txt · Last modified: 2011/09/07 18:19 by jimcraner

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