Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's Blog

Community Spring Cleaning

We have been doing some Spring cleaning and I want to give you a report on where we are, tell you about some future directions, and ask for feedback.

Home Page: The three panels in the Community Home Page now have different types of content: general news on the right panel, community news on the center, and community resource links on the left pane. We are trying to update the right pane several times a week with news related to this community collected from different RSS feeds.  The center pane is updated less frequently, with news from within our own community.  The left page is mostly static and contains links to different resources, including blogs, Wiki projects and people.

Types of Projects:  Projects at Java.Net can be Hosted or Linked.  Hosted projects maintain most of their content using the Java.Net machinery; linked projects exist elsewhere but they are listed in our directories.  Further, projects may be listed in an incubator if they are not yet ready to be fully advertised to the community.  Finally, we also track products of interest to the community.  I've contacted all the projects in the last few weeks, classifying them and, in some cases, deleting projects.  As with any cleanup effort, keeping it up to date is a never ending effort, but we are reasonably up-to-date. Right now we have about 28 projects in the main directory and about 18 in the incubator, with about 13 additional linked or other projects.  We get a few additional project requests each week; we are listing the new projects in the left pane.

Project Directories: There are multiple 'project directories' at Java.Net, some maintained by the SourceCast machinery, some are updated at Java.Net.  We are now trying to keep them all synchronized.  The directories we highlight in the left pane are Wiki pages that list all the projects and will eventually track their status.  We track separatedly the hosted projects (be them in the incubator or in the main directory) from linked and other projects and products.

Downloads: We are running weekly stats on access to our projects (thanks to Kohsuke and Ryan for this!) and we now have a link of popular downloads on the left pane.

Future Directions: There is a fair amount of effort in just keeping the existing infrastructure working; but, beyond that, there are a few ideas that we want to explore:

• A Technical Forum in this space: I have talked with the Java.Net administrators about moderating a technical forum where invited speakers would kick-off a discussion on a technical topic.  I host similar forums at Sun and I have a fairly good set of contacts to get the forum started.
• Improve Project, Product and Learning Content of Wiki: The wiki can contain much more information on these areas.  Just as an example, the learning Wiki page only lists Sang Shin's online course.
• Community Forums: We are currently not using any of the forums for this community.  We could start using them as a way to build community.
  

Comments

• Spring Cleaning
  It seems quite surprising to me that given it's enormous number of projects, there is no longer a link to the general community. I really think there should be. It should definitely be on the communities tab at least, and possibly even the communities tab. Right now it's really hard to get to its project page.

  Also there are also some inactive projects. How about creating a new community called inactive? A simple rule like if a project hasn't been updated in twelve monts could trigger the move. The project owners could be notified of the relocation, to consider releasing project ownership, or to just request reinstatement. Released projects could get some special icon, to encourage others to pick it up.

  John

  Posted by: cajo on May 24, 2004 at 06:36 AM

• Spring Cleaning
  sorry,

  possibly the projects tab as well... DOH!

  Posted by: cajo on May 24, 2004 at 06:37 AM

• Spring Cleaning
  DOH again!

  I didn't realize until now that you were talking about the Java Web Services and XML community specifically. My comments are more for java.net in general.

  Hope somebody can pass the ideas along.

  PS The download stats are really nice, it would be very generous to give this feature to the other communities.

  Posted by: cajo on May 24, 2004 at 06:43 AM

• Spring Cleaning
  Kohsuke wrote the basic software and made it available to all the java.net community leads. It is nothing super fancy but quite useful. If your community leads are interested in using the software, they can contact Kohsuke (kk@dev.java.net).

  Thanks,
  - eduard/o

  Posted by: pelegri on May 24, 2004 at 07:48 AM

• Spring Cleaning
  In our community the incubator is playing a bit of the role you are describing. The situation is not ideal in that we are bundling up-and-comming projects with inactive projects, but it seems a reasonable approximation. If it didn't work we could create another "inactive" category.

  Keeping these directories up-to-date is quite time-consuming, but I hope to do a couple of passes a year through all the projects

  The intention is that the active projects will keep the Wiki pages up-to-date. Any help to make that happen is appreciated :-)

  Thanks,
  - eduard/o

  Posted by: pelegri on May 24, 2004 at 07:54 AM

• New Project Role
  One role I created manually, but would be valuable in gerenal, is that of "Contributor".

  A contributor has Observer privileges plus write/edit access do the Documents & files section of the project. I like to use Documents & files as a public workarea. This role can be granted more generously than the Developer role, which gets unconditional commit privileges to the entire CVS repository. IMO Developer is a far too permissive role to grant very easily.

  I think Contributor would be a good role addition for any community. Ideally Documents & files would log changes; I've already put in a request for that with Helen.

  Posted by: cajo on May 24, 2004 at 11:20 AM

• New Project Role
  That seems a good idea.

  Thanks,

  - eduard/o

  Posted by: pelegri on May 24, 2004 at 12:51 PM

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