[Peers] user interface satisfaction

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Thu, 13 May 2010, jim wrote:

>   i'm not happy. i want to connect with a project,
> but i give up shortly after playing with the OH site.
> all i can offer right now is feelings, but they may
> be helpful.
>
>   i wanna find something fun. i have no idea which
> projects might be fun (what's fun? people involved
> are happy and playful). i can't figure that out by
> reading the scant text available (a project name by
> itself is pretty much no clue; i don't recognize
> most of the project names).
>   i wanna find something that's local to me so i
> can hang out physically with other people. it'd be
> nice to have regional info along with People involved,
> Link, Status, Importance.... i know many projects
> involve people all over the world, but most projects
> have mentors in only a few places--it's the mentors'
> locale that's important.
>   i wanna filter out stuff i don't care about and/or
> filter in stuff i care about. e.g. no solaris, no
> desktop gui, any django, any embedded systems, any
> modules (device drivers), any parrot. i haven't
> discovered any filtering that suits my wishes (it
> might be there, of course).
>   if OH hasn't got info on stuff i wanna get into
> (e.g. django, parrot, seems OH doesn't have much
> about those projects), i'd like a convenient button or
> some such to let me investigate (so why don't i just
> access the django or parrot web site? because i'm
> amazingly lazy; i don't want to have to navigate through
> their web sites and hope i find a path to contribution
> and--very important to me--a path to mentoring; my
> mindset is OH-like, i wanna feel like OH is with me in
> my wanderings, i wanna hook up to something good and
> fun and..., so i'd like some kind of OH portal features
> that do some of the navigation for me and maybe scrapes
> useful info from my digging attempts).

Interesting. Jim, as always, your feedback has been great.

Right now, it's not clear on the site if you're "Mentor" for "Python", is 
that the skill or the project? And we don't really say what to do with 
people who want to offer themselves as mentors in a project.

We can work on that. Bug filed: https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue81

As for localness... well, the map is painfully slow, so that's useless. I 
guess we'd like help making it less slow. Or we'll get to it, "soon."

Filtering out projects is interesting; we didn't really think about an 
interface for *removing* projects from the browse interface. But we could 
actually add that. https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue82

As for what's fun... yeah, that's tough. But it's not impossible. We could 
actually let people vote on projects in free-software-land to see if 
they're actually friendly.

Sorting volunteer opportunities by "Local"ness... now that would be 
awesome. https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue83

I don't understand when you say, "i'd like a convenient button or some 
such to let me investigate".

Those are my thoughts! What are yours now? (-:

-- Asheesh.

-- 
Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them
over the horizon.
 		-- K. A. Arsdall