[IAEP] [DESIGN] Ideas and questions on SL.o

[Sandra Thaxter]

Thanks Luke,   These suggestions are a good start.  Keeping up  a content structure that works takes on-going committment by a someone or some two.  Wondering if there is some innovative way to fund such an effort, small scale but at least it might assure committment and consistency. 

Sandra Thaxter
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Luke Faraone 
  To: IAEP SugarLabs ; Marketing 
  Cc: Stefan Unterhauser ; Bernie Innocenti ; Sebastian Dziallas 
  Sent: Sunday, December 27, 2009 1:33 AM
  Subject: [IAEP] [DESIGN] Ideas and questions on SL.o


  Recently, I attended a presentation along with Walter, Bernie, and Dogi in which students from Babson College discussed the deployability challenges faced by Sugar and SugarLabs in the United States.

  One of the things mentioned was the distributed nature of our project. We have a extensive wiki, a variety of high-traffic mailing lists, and doezens of blogs. For a teacher or administrator looking into the viability of Sugar, it can be quite a daunting task to process and synthesize all these disparate sources into a cohesive message.

  They specifically mentioned the front page of our community, www.SugarLabs.org, as an example of our failure to communicate. While the design is visually appealing and graphically stunning, it suffers from being *too* simplistic in my opinion. In terms of conveying actionable information, it performs poorly. Most people come to an organization's front page with specific goals in mind, and it should be our goal to make it as easy as possible for people to accomplish those goals.

  As Bernie commented during the meeting, "one of the first things as developers we jump for is the link to the wiki". But this link dumps the user to a large, disorganized mass of content in which one can easily get lost. Wiki-gardening is definately a full-time job, probably for more than one person, but as it is, what we have isn't working.

  Therefore, my proposal is simple: redesign www.SugarLabs.org. As a strawman, lets say we were to offer, on the main page, jumping off points to the rest of our community. 

  This would include things like: 

    a.. Download Sugar (Sends them off to the [[Try Sugar]] wikipage)
    b.. Explore teaching resources (needs authoring)

    c.. Solve a problem ([[Sugar help]])
    d.. Get involved 
  Of course, we'd need to have these all link to supporting pages, either on the wiki or elsewhere, but deciding how to organize something is a large part of actually producing usable content. 

  We can also find a place to put the current SL.o explanation text, but I don't think it should be the sole, central focus of the page.

  Comments, criticism, and alternative proposals welcome.

  Thanks,
  Luke Faraone
  http://luke.faraone.cc



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