A proposal for Fedora's website (considering Fedora.next)

(I’d like to apologize upfront, in that I meant to post this about a month or so ago. You might be aware that the Red Hat Summit is coming up in 2 weeks, and I’ve had a few odds and ends to take care of for that event that cut to the front of the line on my task list because of their imminent deadlines!)
So, Fedora.next is shaking Fedora up a bit – enough that our current fedoraproject.org website is going to need a bit of a gut reno to appropriately reflect the new world of Fedora! A few weeks back, Ryan Lerch and I had an informal brainstorming session about how to account for Fedora.next with fedoraproject.org. We came up with what we thought was a pretty workable concept, and met with Matthew Miller a few days later to see what he thought. Here’s the whiteboard of what we came up with:

Whoah, what’s going on here? Okay, let’s walk through this.

The Proposal

There’s several website components to this proposal. We’ll go through each one-by-one. We have some thumbnail mockups of each site to give you a vague idea of the kind of thing we’re thinking of – there are no larger, detailed mockups at this point, except that I think Ryan is working on a prototype of the Brochure site with the websites team, which I think he is planning to blog about soon.

A Fedora ‘Brochure’ Site

So first, let’s create a Fedora website to allow people to learn about Fedora – the Operating System, you know, the sausage we’re making here – and to be able to download it. Ryan and I started calling this the ‘brochure’ site because it’s really informational and aimed at people who have never heard of Fedora before and want to learn more about what it is. It’s also aimed at people who know what Fedora is and use it, but who simply want to download it and get on with their lives. It’s not primarily aimed at contributors.
Some of the sites we were inspired by when coming up with this idea:

• getfirefox.org – simple and clean website introducing what Firefox is, with a prominent single download button, features list, and tour as well as links out to more information about add-ons, support, and Mozilla.
• google.com/chrome – short and sweet introduction to Chrome, with a prominent single download button, screenshots, feature list, and some chromebook / chromecast stuff.
• android.com – clean layout with basic information about Android. It also includes news updates, which the other two didn’t.

Do you think this makes sense to have? It might be cool if we could give it its own domain to separate it out from contributor-centric stuff.

A Fedora User Support Site

Right now, there’s a lot of places within Fedora you can get help. To a newbie, it’s not really clear what the best place to go is. We’ve had ask.fedoraproject.org set up for a while, and it has the potential to become a really useful knowledgebase of help for Fedora users – if only it had enough prominence for more folks to start using it. In this proposal, then, we’re elevating ask.fedoraproject.org to a more prominent position – and having it linked it strongly with the brochure site. We’ll skin it to match the new brochure site as well.
The idea for this site is to be targeted primarily at Fedora users. We could, however, have another instance set up for contributors to ask questions about how to do things within Fedora and get help.
Further on down the line, it’d be really sweet to have Fedora desktop integration with the support site, so you can ask questions and get notifications when answers to your questions are available from the desktop. Maybe?
What do you think?

The Fedora ‘Commnunity Hub’

Okay, so here’s where things get more complex. Full disclosure, too – we’ve tried doing something like this a couple of times now and honestly failed to get wide adoption and also to expand the functionality across Fedora’s disciplines. Hopefully, third time’s the charm! 🙂 Perhaps there is something inherent in this idea that is fatally flawed, though. What do you think?
Well, let’s talk through it, first. It’s inspired by a lot of currently-popular social media sites; we’d really like it to be a place that Fedora contributors would feel compelled to visit daily and refresh throughout the day, depending on how actively they are working on Fedora that given day. (Whether or not we’ll achieve that, of course, we really can’t say or guarantee.) Here’s some of the features this hub would have:

• Logged out mode has new user signup flow: Similar to how Twitter and Facebook operate when you’re logged out of them in a web browser, we were thinking that if you’re not logged into the hub, we don’t know what content would be the most appropriate to show you, so rather than risk a bad experience, let’s just prompt you to log in. This also gives us a nice clean space to promote new account signups. From the logged-out page, we could create a guided Fedora Account System (FAS) account creation flow (that uses FAS as a backend, of course) to help ease users into becoming contributors.
• FAS integration: Speaking of FAS, we were thinking it might be nice if some of the basic account management tasks you do in FAS today were available from this site. E.g., change your password, email address, sign up for groups, that sort of thing. Maybe we could build out a groups UI and make the FAS groups we have more social (well, the groups that serve as more than just an ACL for something else. Maybe we could filter out the ACL groups?)
• Messaging / notification tray: Another inspiration from various social media sites, we were thinking about having a messaging / notification tray along the top of every page in the hub. If there is new content available in one of the streams you’re subscribed to, or maybe if someone has sent you a message or you have a build that’s finished or what not, it’ll pop up as an additional item in your messaging tray. You can see in the ‘logged in’ thumbnail mockup above that the messaging tray has been expanded and shows a bunch of items. Click on any given item and you’ll be taken to the full details for that item, whether it’s a finished build in koji, a new update in bodhi to a package you watch, or a Fedora badge you’ve just been awarded.
• Reddit-like spaces: Fedora is a really big project. We’re big enough and have enough teams and efforts and things going on that I think a global nav to encompass all that we do would be too unwieldy and out-of-date a few days after it was created. We’re more fluid than that. So I really like the idea of how Reddit organizes space within itself – users create spaces (‘subreddits’) that operate roughly under their own governance, and can customize those spaces (albeit in somewhat limited ways, a logo and custom banner I think.) New spaces can be created on an as-needed basis. Every space is basically a forum; each post has threaded comments and there is a voting system both for posts and for comments so the best content bubbles up to the top. We had the idea that we could organize the community hub in this fluid fashion – prepopulate the system with some established spaces, like for the Fedora Design team, Infrastructure team, and maybe the working groups and Fedora.next and projects like that. We’d allow Fedora community members to create and manage their own spaces too, and allow them to customize those spaces to their teams’ needs.

Let’s talk about that last point a little bit more in-depth, since it’s really core to how we were thinking this community hub could be organized.

Sub-hub-hubs and a bottle of rum!

Ideally, the spaces for various Fedora teams and projects on the community hub wouldn’t be limited to forums – we could build out custom widgets that each space could make use of, and tie those widgets into data coming in from fedmsg, for example.
You can see some (very, very rough) thumbnail mockups of what different hubs might look like above. Let me walk you through my brain using these thumbnails as a guide:

• We’ve got an Ambassadors hub that shows a map of current ambassador activity, a swag gallery (lower right) and some discussions (courtesy Hyperkitty?) in the lower left…
• There’s a Development hub with a list of builds and updates along the right column and devel-list discussions as well as announcements in the main content area…
• Of course there is a hub for the Design Team with a widget to show recent mockups / designs, design-team list discussions, an asset search box, and a list of recent tickets along the right…
• Finally, a Marketing hub with recent articles about Fedora from the press aggregated on top, with marketing-list discussions on the bottom, and recent Fedora magazine post along the right sidebar.

The specific content I walked you through on each thumbnail mockup above? It could all be totally bogus. It is a lot of work, figuring out for each team and project, what would be the right content to offer, and how to place it, and how to design widgets that would best hold it. To a certain extent, we’d like each subreddit subhub moderator/admin to create the default content offering, and maybe even allow users to customize for their individual needs further on top of those defaults. We do have to offer some basic tools and feeds, though, to make any of that possible.
You can see in our initial whiteboard that we walked through with Matthew (in the lower left corner) a list of the ways that different teams / efforts have overloaded the wiki to achieve what they needed:

• development docs
• personal pages
• SIG pages
• strategy
• workflow (e.g., QA, design, rel-eng)
• packaging policy
• meeting minutes
• team organization
• asset management (e.g., the design team’s SVGs and PDFs!)
• event management (pre-Flock, sign up for FUDcon in this wiki table!)
• standard test procedures
• UI specs (like this)
• user documentation
• community policy

Maybe some of these things would be better served by mechanisms made for working with them? Maybe we could design and build widgets or tie-ins to pre-existing infrastructure (like meetbot for meeting minutes, as an example) that would help manage these better than a wiki?
Getting flashbacks about early 2000’s web portal design? Yeh. We’re not trying to go there, honestly. Think about a model more similar to Facebook’s groups and apps, if you use Facebook.
On a per-user basis, the user might have a favorites bar or nav bar along the top prepopulated with the subhubs affiliated with the Fedora groups they are a member of. The user could customize this, to remove the subhubs they don’t want in their navbar and to add additional ones.

Does any of this make sense?

Well, what do you think? Ryan and I met with the Fedora websites team a few weeks ago or so to talk through the idea after working up this proposal with Matthew Miller. They were very supportive of the idea. So, we have had some designer-crazy checks up to this point; it can take a village to suss out designer-crazy sometimes, though, so do let us know your thoughts on this!
If need be, we can modify the plan, come up with a new one, or start blazing forward towards making this one a reality. We’ll need your feedback to figure out what to do. So, what do you think?

Addendum

I found this lurking in my Fedora People ~/public_html from 2009 – we’ve thought about this kind of split of the website before, and even thought about hubs (although not necessarily a platform for fluid hubs as in this proposal):

By the way! The scribbly font I used in the mockups is called ‘Redacted’ – it’s an Open Font License font that is really handy for when you want to whip out some quick mockups and don’t want to bother with lorem ipsum text. You can snag it from this link.