Sakai Foundation Website BOF

This BOF is the starting point for focusing on many of the goals that Chuck listed in his recent email regarding the Sakai Foundation Website. Instead of trying to summarize his email I've added it below.

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Chuck's email of November 27th:

I would like to start an effort to re-vision the Sakai web site (www.sakaiproject.org). Our web site is excellen - and very lively due to the work of folks like Susan, Margaret, Aaron, Mary, Anthony, and others. But it has evolved organically from early 2004 until now with no major redesign or ground up thinking as our organization and product and approaches have evolved - everyone has been so busy.

I would like to kick off a brainstorming exercise around our web site that looks at our site from a Information Architecture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_architecture
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/infotecture2/

Yup - User Centered design, search log analysis, the whole nine yards - brainstorm and collectively develop a design together and then use that design to produce the site.

I would like to see a study of the web sites of peer organizations like Kuali, IMS, Apache, Eclipse, ADL, etc and look for ideas we can adopt.

We could even switch technologies from Mambo or perhaps just go to Joomla or whatever - I would like the Community to be more involved in the web site so whatever technology we need to make that happen should be put on the table.

We can come up with ways to integrate Confluence and/or collab spaces more directly into the main site.

We need ways to show the fact that we are one project but at the same time many communities within Sakai.

Frankly - everything is on the table.

I would like to have someone from the community lead and coordinate the effort. I have assigned Anthony Whyte to track ad monitor this work - and I will be involved in the work as well (it will be fun to actually brainstorm on something for once!).

We already have a confluence site for the current web team (Susan, Anthony, Peter, Margaret, and Aaron)

http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/SFS/Home

We also now have a Working Group - "WG: Sakai Foundation Website" so we can ramble on and on over E-Mail and whip stuff up in the wiki, etc etc. The current web team has already been added to the site as members.

You are welcome to join the new site and lurk or comment and help - go to collab and under Membership click Joinable sites - you may have to page down to find the joinable site.

We should have a BOF for this at Atlanta.

/Chuck