SummerCamp day two focused on the citizen journalism, the Campware community, planning the next set of software releases, and redesigning the campware.org website…
The morning opened with Doug giving a presentation on "citizen
journalism" and what others are doing in this area. This is all about getting people involved in the process, for example: readers posting comments about articles, community members writing their own articles, people linking to articles from blogs, and authors and editors keeping their own blogs. See the attached
slides to get a sense about the talk.
Next came a discussion
about how we can help grow our community. A number of stakeholders felt
like they weren’t being heard by the developers. This has mainly been
because the Campsite team has been small and is constantly trying to
catch up to user’s requests. But still we managed to come up with a few
ways to be more responsive.
One aspect of the user feedback
problem has been addressed in Campsite 2.6: bug reporting. There is now an automatic
bug reporting mechanism built into the admin interface – if there is a
problem, the user is presented with a screen asking if they would like
to submit the problem back to the Campsite developers. This has already
started to reap dividends as 8 bugs have been reported this way.
Besides bugs, users can also send feedback directly to the developers
inside the admin interface (go to Main Menu -> Help -> Feedback)
without having to look around to find the right email address or
mailing list to send their ideas to.
We also came up with the idea to categorize feature requests in Trac by stakeholder. In
this way the developers can easily see who is requesting which features and
can also pick a few features from each stakeholder for each release.
Other ideas we came up with:
Hold a monthly "user feedback" online meeting
Create a "How to contribute" document for volunteer developers
Publish "What’s coming" articles on the Campware website
The
rest of the day was spent ironing out how to release LiveSupport by the
September 30th deadline as well as what was going into Campsite 3.0. Another group discussed how to create Campsite plugins, with much
success. You can see the beginning of the spec here.
Finally, Ana lead the discussion on revamping the Campware.org web site. You can see the beginning of the design in the attached image.
Attachments: CitizenJournalism.pdf – Slides from "Citizen Journalism" presentation IA_diagram.gif – www.campware.org site architecture – Redesign Draft
Campware News
SummerCamp day two focused on the citizen journalism, the Campware community, planning the next set of software releases, and redesigning the campware.org website…