Ideas Needed for BeagleBoard.org Web site
Cris
Bridge Worldwide. We're looking to improve the www.beagleboard.org Web
site to evolve into a community where members can collaborate on the
Beagle Board. This includes exchanging concepts, ideas and
applications support. Please share your honest feedback on what your
goals are for the site and what functionality you would like to see.
No idea is too big or small. Thank you in advance!
Jason Kridner
Cris,
Thanks for initiating this discussion. I hope that you can help us
make a site that really appeals to open source developers and
consumers and maximizes their contributions. There are several TI
folk and non-TI folk on this mailing list, all of which should be able
to provide valuable input on what will work best to support the
community.
My current strategy is to leverage existing tools where they fit,
rather than to try to create them. There are some great solutions for
wikis (code.google.com, elinux.org, etc.), version control, bug
tracking, etc. The places where there are on-going projects, such as
kernel.org, freedesktop.org, denx.de, and many others, are the best
places for contributions from the Beagle board community to go, in my
view. However, there is a need to ensure that there is just one place
folks need to go to learn about the latest status on Beagle. Further,
I want to make sure that everyone who contributes to the Beagle Board
projects are able to get visibility relative to their contribution
efforts, quality, and value to consumers.
The website itself is open source and user editable. Down the road,
I'd like to have participants register their projects with
BeagleBoard.org and for the site to automatically pull in updates from
the various project hosting sites. The sorts of thing that ohloh.net
does is also interesting, and I'd be happy to simply monitor
individual reputations using their site.
If you have ideas on how to implement some of my thoughts, or have
some better thoughts on how to suit the needs of growing a community
around OMAP and the Beagle Board, I'm very anxious to hear how you can
contribute.
Regards,
Jason
Cris
research (including into the resources you mentioned) I agree with
your overall assessment. We don't want to reinvent what's already been
done, but there would be a lot of value in giving developers one
central location to get to:
Personalized links to the third-party tools/project sites you
mentioned
Easily access to "my projects", find new projects, and get updates on
projects
Updates on the Beagle Board
A central community for developers to exchange ideas, get help,
network / find developers for projects, etc. (with Web 2.0 tools such
as discussion boards, chat, blogs, etc.)
Recognition for contributions
Plus an eStore, training/events, etc.
I think this is where planning a very intuitive user exprience is key,
so developers can have one access point to get to all of these
resources, whether or not they're hosted on BeagleBoard.org or are
located somewhere else. We need to let developers concentrate on
developing, not figuring out where everything is.
Would love to hear any additional thoughts you have.
Cris
Jason Kridner
I really appreciate you having this conversation out in the open. I
met some of the guys at Bridge today and I thought they were pretty
sharp.
I'd say that the next big thing needed by BeagleBoard.org is a simple
way to register projects/demos/ports, before we solve the dynamic
update problem (which I do believe we need to solve). Would you agree?
-Jason
Cris
Thanks for opening up the opportunity.
Getting developers to register their projects/demos/ports sounds like
a natural first step to me. it sounds like it would help build the
right foundation for the site.
Please feel free to keep sharing any additional ideas/thoughts you
have.
Thanks so much,
Cris
>
> - Show quoted text -
Philip Balister
>
> Of couse, talking with users is one of the things I love about my job.
> Thanks for opening up the opportunity.
> Getting developers to register their projects/demos/ports sounds like
> a natural first step to me. it sounds like it would help build the
> right foundation for the site.
> Please feel free to keep sharing any additional ideas/thoughts you
> have.
Open source developers can be a funny lot :)
To build a community around an open source project is extremely
important. One thing to do is look at what works for other projects.
One set of sites to look at would be:
http://www.openmoko.com/
http://www.openmoko.org/
They are trying to build an open source based phone. (Too bad it is
not based on the beagle:)
Generally speaking, the more productive guys don't like forums, they
prefer listservs.
I also like blog aggregators, such as http://planet.linuxtogo.org,
these are good ways to stay in touch with the people working on the
project.
Also, we tend to not like flash. I'm writing this on an x86_64 Linux
machine and flash seems broken for me now. Most of us have "special"
machines for watching youtube.
Philip