Share.ez.no team kickoff call minutes
Tuesday 17 November 2009 2:19:50 am
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Why was this team gathered today ?
This meeting is inline with the continuous will from eZ Systems to focus on the eZ Community. This focus is up to 100%, the dedicated Community Manager (Nicolas Pastorino) is here to grow the community, make it an even more attractive exchange place, and make sure it is a helpful, fun place to step by when working with eZ Publish.
The newly born http://share.ez.no is a tool for you, by you. Getting involved in making it evolve gives you the chance to share a bit of your skills and motivation in a concrete manner, keeping in mind the will to address the prominent needs of the whole. All participants to this meeting volunteered to be part of the share.ez.no team by answering positively to the call for participants here http://share.ez.no/blogs/ez/welcome-to-the-new-ez-community-portal. Five of them are not eZ employees, are long-time, active members, and decided to give a hand when they can, sharing their time to make share.ez.no yours. And they do have busy schedules, as we all do.
On behalf of the community: thank you.
As any team, some organization is required. This first meeting helped nail down the main ideas and objectives, sketch out the organization, and understand how we'll work together. Enforcing total transparency and openness, all meeting minutes and activity reports will be published on the dedicated "Share.ez.no team" blog on this website.
We need more hands and volunteers. So if you want to get involved, even for small tasks, drop an email at community [at] ez [dot] no, we'll happily share the job :)
And don't forget to share your thoughts: post a comment under this blog post!
Everyone presented himself. The participants were:
Damien Pobel and Robin Muilwijk could not join this day.
Help the community grow, be relevant, attractive and fun.
Objectives in terms of content were discussed:
The lack of educational content, real-world, goal-driven tutorials was raised. Content that typically would help new comers to eZ Publish easily jump on and get things done. Tutorials like the now aging "Scandinavian Check Mates" tutorial (http://ez.no/ezpublish/documentation/building_an_ez_publish_site) are a good example of such. They lead to a concrete result. More of these "Back to basics" are needed. Such tutorials could take the form of a series of blog posts, spaced in time and contributed to by different persons (this contribution should count in a partner/user's rank).
But for the form of blogging mentioned above, we are not sure of how intensively a community member could blog on this platform. She usually has a personal blogging platform, and may already be blogging about ez Publish there. This content is then surfaced through planets and feeds. Having community partners blog and get points for that can ensure a frequent and relevant blogging activity. eZ Systems employees are also prone to blogging on this platform.
Integrating other valuable information sources of the ecosystem is important. It should be done the soft way, in the first round at least, through aggregating the diffuse content into one or several RSS feeds. The feed can also be surfaced partly on share.ez.no, in 'preview' mode, the 'read more' links leading to the original site. Among other the following are concerned:
Non-english-speaking communities could also be part of this aggregation, while keeping their own activity. The language barrier can be overcome using automatic translation (with the appropriate warnings). A useful tool in this regard is: http://projects.ez.no/planetezpublishtranslatedrssfeed.
A proper communication is required before triggering such actions. A drop off in forum activity was noted when switching to share.ez.no, which should not be repeated.
On the previous platform a moderation system was in place. Volunteers were removing inappropriate content when needed. This should be restored. On top of this, content qualification needs to be done, manually, in order to spot the most useful, perenial content. This implies having a clear set of rules and guidelines for content writing, publicly evangelized to all share.ez.no user (see http://ez.no/developer/forum/guidelines). This manual moderation could mitigate the rating (thumbs up, star rating), which often end up with being average, in average (descreasing its usefulness).
Possible applications are :
An issue with the current online documentation was raised: it lacks interactivity. Someone spotting a missing bit of documentation (http://ez.no/doc/ez_publish/technical_manual/4_x/reference/configuration_files/fetchalias_ini) should be able to propose an edit to make the documentation more complete. The edits should then be reviewed by moderators. This would require first moving the documentation to share.ez.no. This need may be already partly addressed by eZpedia.org.
Action: contact eZpedia.org responsibles and discuss the feasibility/relevancy of a joint effort with share.ez.no
One of the main tasks will be to refine the design. A design contest would be a way for the motivated designers to get involved and propose a work suiting their taste. A vote would rate the proposals and point to the best one, according to the community's voice. The winner(s) should be rewarded.
Following the recent release of the new Business Partner Program, the Community Program shall be released soon. It will detail how one can become a Community Partner, what benefits it encompasses for a company becoming Community Partner, in terms of visibility among other, and finally what the prerequisites are for being eligible.
A pragmatic, consice and simple way of working together is to be set up. An simplified agile method (like scrum) is an option. Clear definitions of goals, and a breakdown of the larger Use Cases into realistic tasks will be keys this team's mommentum. Most of the management overhead will in the short team be handled by the Community Manager, but ownership of the process will be shared with the community eventually. A tool like scrumpad is thought of. The interface between this tool and the share.ez.no team needs to be made a bit simpler than what it currently is.
I'll be working on getting you access to the SVN repository.