Website Committee Call 2/8/05
present: Amanda, Steve, John

Big Stuff
We really need a better looking site, no one has jumped up to take that on, though.
(todo: John will try new tactics to pressure the NOSI list community to come through and offer help developing a theme for the site.)
(todo: Amanda will reach out to the CivicSpaceLabs community to see if she can inspire anyone to help develop a theme for the site.)

The site as a whole and the calendar separately are syndicated and available as RSS feeds.

[SC CALL] We need to involve the NOSI community in creating content for the site -- soliciting specific articles from individuals was proposed as one idea. We settled on encouraging people to blog and promoting good journal entries and/or story submissions to the front page on some kind of regular basis. This would entail moving the primer to a box so it would stay on the front page, and adding a box for recent articles to the site, so that submissions that aren't promoted are still accessible and people know that there is reading material there.

We don't want to host general interest blogs, we want to invite members of the NOSI Community to write about things that are related to NOSI. What Open Source Software are you using, challenges you've experienced, barriers and frustrations, great stories: we need to firm up some language that describes what we are looking for.
(done: the blog module is enabled)
(todo: Amanda will add some thoughtful guiding questions to the blog entry form)
(todo: when the time comes, Amanda will look over the list of people who have signed up so far and send individual invitations out to each of them inviting them to submit content)

[SC CALL] We will discuss creation of a website volunteer community on the next NOSI SC call. Things that the website volunteers could do include:
* gathering, classifying and adding weblinks to the site
* gathering, classifying and adding events to the site
* overall site design
* the NOSI site is on its own shell account, so we can give people we trust access to it without giving them access to anything else at LINC.

[SC CALL] Amanda wants to run a survey about how members of the NOSI community are using Open Source office servers. Would this be an appropriate use of the site?

Little Stuff

The calendar shoots off the page.
(todo: Amanda will look at this; it is probably something that needs to be resolved in the theme, so if we get a better theme it should fix itself.)

(todo: Amanda will test migrating to CivicSpace again)

OTHER NOTES

* content: started a weblinks module and stuff isn't public right now. It would be cool if people started using it. It isn't formatted well but perhaps people could do some work on it.

* John mentioned that the Calender module doesn't really work that well

* Steve says page is text heavy. Make a box for article of month, block for primer.

* Amanda knows we could have an aggregator if we want but we don't think that makes sense right now.