on the wireframes and layout i saw.

[Carlo Frinolli | nois3lab]

Hey all,

I just took a bit of time to go through all the iteration, in particular the last one (thanks Matt!), graphics element, and layout proposals.

Here are my thoughts (feel free to insult me anytime):

LOVE

* the logo

* the project

LIKE

* general impact for the art direction and look and feel. It is warm, participatory, and inclusive.

* general completeness of the project and the thoughts behind this

* page descriptions

* project page wireframes

DISLIKE

* old conception for website, site-centric. 

What I mean here is what i tried to explain during last week's call. I'd like to see content FROM social media where ppl discuss about things to be brought to Drumbeat website AND I'd like to see content (projects, events, and so on) produced on Drumbeat website to be brought to social media web sites. For this purpose I'd suggest an iteration that includes Paul Booker's suggestion (http://drupal.org/project/activitystream) to aggregate the content (this means a little change into blocks), and a following iteration that implies some dev work with social media APIs.

Why this is better to me?

When the community is ready to produce a huge amount of content, it'll amplify the results spreading it all over the web with (in my desire) a few clicks.

I also think that here (as Paul was the developer for Drupal Flickr module a little while ago) we can have the ability to do so.

We have some idea we're fleshing out a little better before sharing with you.

MAYBE BETTER

* engagement of users (in those layout it's not clear whether it will be present in any page or not)

NOT CLEAR

* how technically do you imagine the possibility to add a tool to project page (Wiki, Forum, etc). It looks automagical... but even though I'm a little experienced in drupal dev, still it's unclear to me

* how technically do you image to modify the Google Maps marker on the map 

SUGGESTIONS

* project activity (One of the things I think lacks more in open source projects (say drupal contributed modules for instance) is a clear visual indicator of the "health" of that project. Something that lets you think that "waste" time behind such project worths the effort)

* I love contextual blocks indeed. I'll write down a post in my blog about that at some point, but in the meantime

  * related projects (by tag - or taxonomy term)

  * other projects from this initiator

  * tagging and rating on the project (community powered, so that ppl can rate and tag the project aside from the project initiator)

* geographically contextual informations (http://drupal.org/project/ip2locale)

* visualizing the flow. something like this (http://geotwitter.org/)

HATE

* looking like a complaing one in this long boring email.

Carlo Frinolli [ creative director ]

[ website | http://nois3lab.it ]

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[Matthew Thompson]

Hey, Carlo. This is outstanding analysis and feedback. Let's iterate together. Specific thoughts in-line below.

DISLIKE

* old conception for website, site-centric. 

We're on the same page -- we're definitely trying to avoid a "site-centric" approach (that's a great term for it). But your analysis helped me realize that may not be apparent from the latest wireframe. It's what we meant by "Balancing internal vs. external tools & functionality is key" on the page description. 

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/website/page_descriptions#Context_.26_Strategy

Our assumption is that a huge portion of the work and conversation on projects will occur OUTSIDE of the Drumbeat site. So the design challenge you rightly hit on is: how do we design online workspaces that reflect that? Our thinking is that there should be no big difference between whether a Drumbeat project wiki, for example, lives on our site or outside of it -- we want the experience to be as seamless for the user as possible regardless.

What I mean here is what i tried to explain during last week's call. I'd like to see content FROM social media where ppl discuss about things to be brought to Drumbeat website AND I'd like to see content (projects, events, and so on) produced on Drumbeat website to be brought to social media web sites. For this purpose I'd suggest an iteration that includes Paul Booker's suggestion (http://drupal.org/project/activitystream) to aggregate the content (this means a little change into blocks), and a following iteration that implies some dev work with social media APIs.

This looks like a great module to investigate! I've forwarded it onto our back-end developers to research. I love the idea of pulling multiple social networking feeds into a single stream like that. It'll also be pulled in and spread across the various tabs and content types. 

One question I've had: in cases where a great blog post lives elsewhere, like Aza Raskin's "Making Privacy Policies Not Suck",

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/making-privacy-policies-not-suck/

...how do we embed that existing external blog post or page? Instead of having to copy and paste into a new Drupal node? Any ideas or tools to look at?

When the community is ready to produce a huge amount of content, it'll amplify the results spreading it all over the web with (in my desire) a few clicks.

Absolutely. It makes me think we should consider how to strongly encourage Drumbeat projects to set up this kind of third-party infrastructure -- as a way to increase their own capacity. We want to offer internal Drumbeat functionality as a back-up or alternative. But in many ways, it's better for everyone for the Drumbeat page to simply embed and aggregate these other tools -- as a way to spread both the project and Drumbeat's profile. 

I also think that here (as Paul was the developer for Drupal Flickr module a little while ago) we can have the ability to do so.

We have some idea we're fleshing out a little better before sharing with you.

This sounds great -- send those ideas along so we can work them into the next iteration! Also would love to get more suggestions on specific modules or Drupal plug-ins we should be looking at to help accomplish these goals.

MAYBE BETTER

* engagement of users (in those layout it's not clear whether it will be present in any page or not)

Can you flesh this point out a bit? Not sure exactly what you mean. 

NOT CLEAR

* how technically do you imagine the possibility to add a tool to project page (Wiki, Forum, etc). It looks automagical... but even though I'm a little experienced in drupal dev, still it's unclear to me

Our thinking is that in each case when you click to add a tool to the project page, the project admin is given the option to

a) supply a link or embed code to embed an existing external resource (e.g., the URL for an existing external Wiki) or

b) if they don't have that, or prefer an alternative, to create their own internal Drupal-supported version instead (e.g., a Drupal content type that behaves and looks like a wiki)

http://drupal.org/node/356583

The tabs you see in the wireframe appear only once the corresponding tool has been added.

* how technically do you image to modify the Google Maps marker on the map 

Our back-end developers at Trellon have a solution for this. In all cases, our preference is to use existing modules and avoid any custom development. 

SUGGESTIONS

* project activity (One of the things I think lacks more in open source projects (say drupal contributed modules for instance) is a clear visual indicator of the "health" of that project. Something that lets you think that "waste" time behind such project worths the effort)

Like a progress indicator, or milestones, or "thermometer" that helps show you what percentage "complete" the project is? I love this idea, and agree it's effective. The challenge is coming up with something that's scalable across multiple diverse projects. And we're trying to avoid over-engineering or over-building for phase one. But a specific idea or module here would be great. I agree that measures of progress help spur participation, and makes you feel like measurable progress is getting done!

* I love contextual blocks indeed. I'll write down a post in my blog about that at some point, but in the meantime

  * related projects (by tag - or taxonomy term)

  * other projects from this initiator

  * tagging and rating on the project (community powered, so that ppl can rate and tag the project aside from the project initiator)

* geographically contextual informations (http://drupal.org/project/ip2locale)

* visualizing the flow. something like this (http://geotwitter.org/)

Agree that "related projects" is a great idea. (Ned: add to next wireframe?)

"Other projects from this initiator" -- would also be covered on the individual's profile page. Not sure how many use cases we'll get where one initiator has multiple active projects...

 Rating -- agree that this should be more prominent on the project page. (Maybe add "like this project" along with "share / follow / donate?") Tags are already included in the project description box, but could be made a little more prominent.

HATE

* looking like a complaing one in this long boring email.

What are you talking about?!  :) 

This is exactly the kind of analysis we need. These project pages are the most difficult and important to get right. We need to attack their logic to make them better, and the central point you're seizing on -- the need to avoid overly "site-centric" approaches -- is crucial. It's one of the major design challenges of this page, for certain -- so let's keep hammering away on it! I feel like our ability to execute on exactly this point will help define us as a true "2010" online platform -- instead of an outdated version of how people really use the web.

Matt

[Carlo Frinolli | nois3lab]

Hey all, again.

I answered inline to matt's email, and I removed pointless repetitions substituting them with [...], hope it's clear. Bug me anytime for clarifications.

Il giorno 08/dic/2009, alle ore 04.42, Matthew Thompson ha scritto:

[...]

Our assumption is that a huge portion of the work and conversation on projects will occur OUTSIDE of the Drumbeat site. So the design challenge you rightly hit on is: how do we design online workspaces that reflect that? Our thinking is that there should be no big difference between whether a Drumbeat project wiki, for example, lives on our site or outside of it -- we want the experience to be as seamless for the user as possible regardless.

Well yes, on one hand. On the other hand I still think that avoiding site-centric website, should necessarily mean shuffling external and internal content. I think that is right to render them differently because the keypoint is to render them both. Mainly because the internal content will happen less frequently than the external flow. And also they're mutual: if we provide a new project there will be reactions outside (like tweets, comments, threads...), and there will be reactions on the project itself starting from those reactions. It's avalanche effect. What I think is challenging is to find an effective way to render and display it so that people can understand the continuous cause/effect chain started.

This looks like a great module to investigate! I've forwarded it onto our back-end developers to research. I love the idea of pulling multiple social networking feeds into a single stream like that. It'll also be pulled in and spread across the various tabs and content types. 

One question I've had: in cases where a great blog post lives elsewhere, like Aza Raskin's "Making Privacy Policies Not Suck",

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/making-privacy-policies-not-suck/

...how do we embed that existing external blog post or page? Instead of having to copy and paste into a new Drupal node? Any ideas or tools to look at?

Well, I don't know how can this work for a single blog post, but for sure we can aggregate RSS feeds for "trusted" and "loved" blogs and website, so that the average result will be the aggregation of helpful and interesting posts.

What I'm thinking of is also a collector of information, rather than a simple creator of contents.

Absolutely. It makes me think we should consider how to strongly encourage Drumbeat projects to set up this kind of third-party infrastructure -- as a way to increase their own capacity. We want to offer internal Drumbeat functionality as a back-up or alternative. But in many ways, it's better for everyone for the Drumbeat page to simply embed and aggregate these other tools -- as a way to spread both the project and Drumbeat's profile.

This is definitely a matter where some dev could be very helpful. I think we need to sit down and understand how the information architecture would work. For instance: this is something that we want for a single post or are we willing to have a sort of elected ring of website that can do the same thing? Or better we want the ability to pull content from every capable website (let's say a blog, a cms or something that actually can communicate through xmlRPC or REST or something).

Also we do know that Drumbeat will be powered by Drupal. 

To me it could be a nice idea to permeate these two communities that share the same aim, at least on a technical point of view.

One way could be to sponsor some module development which can be VERY helpful for an open web point of view.

Let's say we're moving in this "social" way, and we need those modules. Well I think something fantastic that Drumbeat should do is: if those modules don't exist well they should be funded under the condition that they will be released under GPL license or similar.

This sounds great -- send those ideas along so we can work them into the next iteration! Also would love to get more suggestions on specific modules or Drupal plug-ins we should be looking at to help accomplish these goals.

We're already investigating in this sense, and fleshing out some more about this project. Some of them don't exist yet (or at least I think so!), this is the reason why we're writing down a small project about that.

MAYBE BETTER

* engagement of users (in those layout it's not clear whether it will be present in any page or not)

Can you flesh this point out a bit? Not sure exactly what you mean. 

Sure, it wasn't clear at all. 

I assume that the main goal in Drumbeat's life is to aggregate and engage people in projects. Well as far as i saw, I didn't see a clear invitation in every single page. I think that an engagement element should be present in every page. Starting from the home page, which has it, to the project (like - join this project, discuss with the workers, comment... and so on)... What I'm trying to say is that on one hand is really important to actively engage people in participating in Drumbeat but on the other hand, my experience taught me so, some of the ppl won't actively participate so it's also important to engage them on a lower level. Like comments, ratings, feedbacks, and so on.

[...]

Our thinking is that in each case when you click to add a tool to the project page, the project admin is given the option to

a) supply a link or embed code to embed an existing external resource (e.g., the URL for an existing external Wiki) or

b) if they don't have that, or prefer an alternative, to create their own internal Drupal-supported version instead (e.g., a Drupal content type that behaves and looks like a wiki)

http://drupal.org/node/356583

The tabs you see in the wireframe appear only once the corresponding tool has been added.

Yes ok. I'd suggest, rather than embedding things that merely happen outside Drumbeat website, to investigate a way to let those services communicate between each other. AND let you have it in the project page.

The wiki is definitely the easiest. There are a collection of tools that we at nois3lab are using to emulate a wiki itself.

Together with BOOK content-type, which provides outlining of elements, and revisions, we added wikitools (http://drupal.org/project/wikitools), and freelinking (http://drupal.org/project/freelinking).

Also, we added a special view (http://drupal.org/project/views), a draggable view (http://drupal.org/project/draggableviews) to let our workmate rearrange easily the documents you're working on.

Also I think could be helpful a diff feature (http://drupal.org/project/diff) to resume revisions and see the differences and talk (http://drupal.org/project/talk) to separate comment from page.

[...]

Our back-end developers at Trellon have a solution for this. In all cases, our preference is to use existing modules and avoid any custom development. 

fair enough :)

[...]

Like a progress indicator, or milestones, or "thermometer" that helps show you what percentage "complete" the project is? I love this idea, and agree it's effective. The challenge is coming up with something that's scalable across multiple diverse projects. And we're trying to avoid over-engineering or over-building for phase one. But a specific idea or module here would be great. I agree that measures of progress help spur participation, and makes you feel like measurable progress is getting done!

http://drupal.org/project/pcp

well this is for profiles, but I'm pretty sure that project activity (which I assume will be something like a Drupal View) can be measured as well, starting from a number of users, comments and so on... I think this could be a small snippet of php or js code which measure and transform in a visual indicator that very activity.

* I love contextual blocks indeed. I'll write down a post in my blog about that at some point, but in the meantime

  * related projects (by tag - or taxonomy term)

  * other projects from this initiator

  * tagging and rating on the project (community powered, so that ppl can rate and tag the project aside from the project initiator)

* geographically contextual informations (http://drupal.org/project/ip2locale)

* visualizing the flow. something like this (http://geotwitter.org/)

Agree that "related projects" is a great idea. (Ned: add to next wireframe?)

"Other projects from this initiator" -- would also be covered on the individual's profile page. Not sure how many use cases we'll get where one initiator has multiple active projects...

sounds right

 Rating -- agree that this should be more prominent on the project page. (Maybe add "like this project" along with "share / follow / donate?") Tags are already included in the project description box, but could be made a little more prominent.

Yeah, but those tags are project chosen right? I was thinking of a sort of community tags for projects, where ppl categorize them in a slightly different way...  A sort of "I see this project here and here" and "users see this there and there" 

HATE

* looking like a complaing one in this long boring email.

What are you talking about?!  :) 

This is exactly the kind of analysis we need. These project pages are the most difficult and important to get right. We need to attack their logic to make them better, and the central point you're seizing on -- the need to avoid overly "site-centric" approaches -- is crucial. It's one of the major design challenges of this page, for certain -- so let's keep hammering away on it! I feel like our ability to execute on exactly this point will help define us as a true "2010" online platform -- instead of an outdated version of how people really use the web.

/me blushes out.