[OH-Dev] Requesting feedback: Suggestions on improving organization of OpenHatch site

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi Peers and OH-Dev,

Karen and I were talking a few days ago about how we could improve the 
organization of information in the OpenHatch website. First, some 
background on what we were thinking, and then some specific change 
suggestions.

I'm willing to tackle all of these in due course. If someone else wants to 
jump in on any of these, too, that'd be grand.

This is a fairly large proposal, but if you care about how OpenHatch shows 
to the world what we do and who we are, both as a community of like-minded 
volunteers and an organization, then you probably want to read this all 
the way through. Get a glass of beer/coffee/kombucha. It's also flexible; 
I want the best result possible, so please discuss (or at least top-post a 
"looks good"). (-:


Background on what we were thinking
-----------------------------------

Bradley Kuhn has suggested for a while that OpenHatch makes its "service plan" 
clear, so that as an open source project maintainer, or any other kind of 
person, when you visit the site, you can see all the ways the org/community can 
help you. For this reason I propose creating a "Services" page.

I personally want to emphasize that a lot of the value of our name is the 
community of people doing high-quality outreach and who care about it. To that 
end, I want the front page to vividly declare that we're not just a non-profit 
but a community. (I think the "About" page, then, should then mostly not have 
the detailed blurbs of our activities, but instead point to a new Services page 
for that info.) In particular, the Events mailing list is becoming an 
increasingly-good resource.

At the moment, there's no clear index of the different kinds of events 
that we can help projects/communities organize. We see a need for this 
when e.g. Daniel of Boston.rb asks to talk to me on the phone for 
information about Project Nights. It'd be great to document these 
somewhere (not necessarily to replace the high-bandwidth communication).

Oh, and where it improves things, we should follow current trends in web 
design.


Front page: slight text changes
-------------------------------

In terms of the organization motto on the front page, I propose a change from:

"OpenHatch is a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free software 
contributors with communities, tools, and education."

to something as yet not fully baked that empasizes that we're not just an 
official organization but a community.


All pages: footer should be long and useful
--------------------------------------------

Right now, the footer contains just a few links.

What I'd rather see is that the footer be, in effect, something of a site map. 
You can see this pattern in place on modern, hip websites like 
http://www.heroku.com/ . Ours might contain:


OpenHatch web app code
* Intro for developers
* Github (source code)
* Bug tracker
* Devel mailing list
* Code docs

Organization
* About
* Blog
* Contact
* Privacy policy

Other web tools
* Wiki
* Forum


New page: Services
------------------

On this page, we list all the different audiences of people who might care 
about OpenHatch (the organization and community) and what we can provide them. 
Each service contains a "Get involved" link, which goes somewhere useful.

Mostly we provide these services over the Internet for free. For help at a 
large scale, especially in person, the organization sometimes requests a fee to 
offset its costs.

An outline:

For newcomers to open source
* Training missions
* The volunteer opportunity finder provides entry-level tasks
* Introductory teaching events, online and in-person, including a curated 
calendar of open source learning events (providing at least one per month) and 
University campus outreach events

For programming enthusiasts with in-person user groups
* Events mailing list
* Specific diversity and newcomer-friendliness outreach events (see our Events 
catalog)

For open source project maintainers
* We can help you audit your project for newcomer-friendliness
* The volunteer opportunity finder showcases bitesize bugs
* Training missions to make it easier to on-board newcomers
* Newcomer management workflow, including "I want to help!" button
* In-person or Internet-based help organizing outreach events (see our Events 
catalog)

Conference organizers
* Talks about newcomer outreach within open source
* Talks about newcomer-friendliness and diversity within in-person programming 
communities
* See slides and video of past talks on our Publications page


New page: Publications
----------------------

I'm not totally sure what the best name for this page is ("Press" or maybe 
"Publicity" or "Publications"), but it'd be great to keep a public index of 
mentions of OpenHatch or workshops we've facilitated in media, as well as 
presentations we've given or articles we've written.

This could be as simple as as a wiki page or a category on the blog that we 
keep up-to-date.

We already attempt to do this at bostonpythonworkshop.com and 
campus.openhatch.org; it'd be great to have all those press mentions aggregated 
into the same place.


New page/subsite: Events handbook/cookbook
------------------------------------------

The Events handbook/cookbook contains pages on specific outreach event types 
that we recommend organizing. Some are in-person; some are online. Some are for 
meetup groups; some are for open source communities.

This could just be a collection of pages on the OpenHatch wiki. The important 
thing is that it's easy to see the entire list of these pages (perhaps just a 
wiki category) and that the info page about each event contain all the 
following info:

* Goal of the event
* Photo of one (if available)
* How to run it
* How OpenHatch usually helps
* Links to blog posts etc. of past instances of the event
* Links to resources they'll find useful when organizing

The idea is that the next time someone says, "I want to run a Project Night," 
or "I want to run a diversity-oriented Python Workshop," we can give them a 
link to one of these pages.

This would largely replace the current /events/ page.

We've thought about taking the Boston Python Workshop material and 
re-organizing the material into something that other city Python workshops 
for women+friends can easily re-use. That could be a set of sub-pages in 
this Events handbook, or instead it could be an entire separate site that 
the "Python Workshop (intro, diversity outreach event)" page links to. For 
now, it seems to me that in-depth info on one particular event is outside 
the scope of an "Events handbook/cookbook" but I'm open to ideas.

These event info pages don't *replace* direct contact with us; they're just the 
published, aggregated knowledge that we've gathered. Hopefully they encourage 
*more* people to contact us as they have a better idea of each event type is 
like.

Pages I believe would be in this Events handbook/cookbook/whatever it ends up 
being called:

* Organizing principles of our events, AKA The OpenHatch Way
* Python Workshop for diversity and newcomer outreach
* Project night
* Open Source Comes to Campus
* Build It
* Test It
* Starling Bounty (inspired by Fedora Design Bounty)


Wiki theme
----------

As an added bonus, Karen and I discussed what it would take to make a wiki 
theme that uses the current openhatch.org site layout. We think we have a 
pretty reasonable plan that respects both the underlying concepts of wiki 
layout and the current site design. I'll spare you the details here, but I 
want to emphasize that it can be done because it's important that pages 
like "About" look professional, and using the same theme across the wiki 
and the main site will help that.