Re: [Dfey-nw-discuss] Re: DFEY website redesign

[Robert Leverington]

On 2009-07-13, Tim Dobson wrote:
> Tim Dobson wrote:
>> Now we have at least one new local group starting up in the South East, 
>> an increasing number of interested people and a pretty logo, I think  
>> it's the right time to start thinking about developing a prominent web  
>> presence
>
> I was thinking of a web presence along the following sort of lines.
>
> DFEY.org would be a backbone organisation providing structure, direction  
> and links, perhaps a bit like lug.org.uk in some ways.
>
> Lets start with mailing lists.
>
> Hopefully, lists would be provided by the Savannah project,  
> www.nongnu.org - mailman servers are really really hard to run well and  
> the guys at Savannah do a great job at making our lives as easy as 
> possible.
>
> We should be able to, on request, set up new mailing lists for new  
> localgroups (hopefully dfey-*-discuss format).
>
> I think there should be a dfey-general-discuss for general  
> non-geographical discussion and perhaps dfey-admin-discuss for  
> non-geographic administration boringness. :)

This makes sense to me, maybe avoid dfey-admin-discuss for now as we are
not at the stage where there is such a high volume that this is
distracting.

> DFEY.org
>
> The DFEY.org home page would be fairly simplistic, concise and low on  
> text content, linking one to several other main pages (again, concise,  
> small amounts of text) and a "more" page containing links other content.
>
> On the three main pages, perhaps we would describe DFEY, talk about  
> local groups and mention how you can get involved. (The last two seem  
> very similar - maybe not those two!)

Something simillar was discussed, but the general consensus was that
there would not be sufficient content to span multiple pages - at least
for the time being.  This is always something that can be added on
eventually.

> *.dfey.org or dfey.org/
>
> In my opinion, local groups should have their own web presence. It  
> shouldn't be forced, but a local DFEY group in Kent and in Glasgow, as  
> much as they might all wish to meet face to face, probably aren't going  
> to, and would probably like to design their own region specific DFEY 
> sites.

This is fair enough, probably something for individual groups to focus
on of course.  For now I don't think this should be a priority as it can
easily be added at any time.

> Wiki's
>
> I don't know about wiki's. Wiki's are great for adding ideas  to,  
> collaborating on stuff, planning meeting, discussing stuff...
> But you have to work VERY hard to make them work as a homepage as the  
> important info gets hidden in links that don't appear too be obvious.
> I can see the benefits for having a unified wiki for local groups, but  
> at the same time there's a lot to be said for running one's own.
>
> The DFEY-NW wiki needs a cleanup; there is no doubt about that.

As you say running a wiki involves a significant amount of work, and I
doubt there will be people in every DFEY branch that enjoy that sort of
thing.  There is also not a huge amount of content that would be unique
to each wiki.  With this in mind I think it makes sense to have a single
wiki.  There was talk about using the DFEY-SE wiki as a base for this
and gradually moving content from the DFEY-NW wiki (and actually keeping
it in a nice condition this time).  I'm happy for this to happen, and
will gladly take responsibility for keeping it in shape, what does
everyone else think?

> Logo's
>
> I imagined dfey.org using the vanilla DFEY logo and local groups using a  
> template of the logo with then the region they revolve around underneath  
> in text. Take a look at this page to see what I mean.
> http://nw.dfey.org/wiki/Press_resources

Seems to already be implemented. :)

> IRC
>
> I would imagine that the #dfey channel would start to become more  
> focused on non-geographic discussion and that #dfey-* would become used  
> in general for discussion about geographic stuff.
> There have been discussions about different networks, however, for the  
> time being, lets stick with freenode and discuss it in detail once we  
> have a new website online.

Absolutely, this shouldn't be a priority at the moment.

Robert