[OH-Dev] [Peers] Rough sketch of products

[Karen Rustad]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 7:42 PM, Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at asheesh.org> wrote:

> To answer that, here is a quick summary of the "products" we currently
> offer.
>
> 1 Campus outreach events
>
> 2 Volunteer opportunity finder
>
> 3 newcomer friendly event calendar
>
> 4 Project pages on the openhatch site
>
> 5 Diversity outreach events for meet up groups
>
> 6 Web forums within OpenHatch
>
> 7 Training missions
>

Relevant to this discussion, and the second-level domain discussion in the
OpenHatch devel meeting earlier today: tonight I made a giant high-level
service map of all the stuff OpenHatch does and what parts of it could be
spun off / what APIs or information transfer would go between different
services were they separated. It's located here:
http://www.littlegreenriver.com/stuffs/OH-services-chart.png

It's a mess, because I made it in Twiddla (only slightly cleaned up from
http://www.twiddla.com/614060). Maybe I will make a cleaner version later.
Or not.

Some random thoughts I have looking at it:

Interestingly, only OH-main, project pages, training missions, and forums
really need login integration -- and even then, most of their functions
could be used sans login. The volunteer opportunity finder totally doesn't
need it.

I was never especially sold on the importance / necessity of the OH forums,
and after making this chart, I feel that way with more certainty. They're
not just not used, they're not integrated. I'm not sure how we'd change
that.

We use lot more outside data/input than might be obvious. Our interfaces for
getting said outside material, as a rule, are lacking. (See: the flaky
non-standardized methodology for adding bugtrackers; the nonexistent methods
for writing new missions)

The most important things OpenHatch (the website) does, or could do, with
regard to making in-person events like campus.OH work: a functioning,
well-used Buildhelper; project-curated lists of bugs for newcomers (or the
volunteer opportunities finder in the absence of such); and the training
missions.

Making sense of the events ecosystem is hard. There's no actual central
website for two out of the three event types that we sponsor--yet they're
not only supposed to feed into events.OH, they're supposed to also get used
(by type, excluding other sorts of events!) by other parts of the sprawling
OH nega-empire. Eeesh.

The Starling bounties don't really have a home anywhere (except our wiki
:P). Maybe we should merge them with the idea of hand-picked bitesize bugs
on project pages? They're pretty similar concepts.

I'm not certain yet if project pages could be usefully spun off from
OH-main. I do think that the training missions and the volopps finder can be
spun off reasonably easily, and probably should be. Events.OH and campus.OH,
of course, are already pretty separate--what they need is not more
decentralization but better integration (via an API, preferably).

Note: A number of the links between services on this map do not actually
exist yet, or exist but work poorly. I guess this is a ideal-case scenario
map.

-- Karen
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