Notes from Web Site Task Force Meeting on August 12
davidwboswell
Present: ned, fligtar, rdoherty, cslyon, davidwboswell, liz, julie,
lforrest, mary, rebron, jswisher, chelsea, fuzzyfox, kairo, alina
- Scope of Task Force
After a round of introductions we discussed how the first meeting
should be about process and we can get into specific issues in future
meetings. The first part of the process was discussing what the scope
of this group should be. Initial suggestions were:
* Creating opt-in guides and resources (eg, the Community Sites style
guide)
* Providing a point of contact for currently unowned website issues
(eg, making a decision about abandoned sites where there is no owner)
Julie made a point that we shouldn't limit ourselves to just these two
things and there could be other needs, such as creating policies. Her
example was that on some sites there is a need for a hate speech
policy, but she didn't want to create that policy in isolation.
Having a place to discuss this with a large group of stakeholders was
good.
Another question dealt with if this group was dealing with just
Mozilla sites owned by a Mozilla organization (MoCo, MoFo, etc) or
also includes sites run by community members. This seemed to depend
on the issue being discussed -- for example, consistent design issues
can cover the whole of the web universe, but legal issues such as a
privacy policy are obligations just for sites owned by organizations.
When distinctions between organization-owned and community-owned sites
need to be made, there is no easy way to do this. For example, just
looking at where a site is hosted won't reveal this since MoCo hosts
many community sites, such as the SeaMonkey site. We may need to
create better documentation so the ownership information is available
for reference.
Ownership can also determine if a proposal turns into an opt-in guide
(like the Community Sites style guide) or a requirement (all
organizationally owned sites need to link to a privacy policy).
- Operations of Taskforce
Ned went over a draft proposal for a web fonts guide. We looked at
this as a template for use for other proposals instead of looking at
the proposal itself. The format is fairly straight-forward -- there's
a problem stated, a solution presented and use cases shown. This
proposal also highlights what will happen without a guide -- sites are
already starting to use fonts in different ways so in the absence of a
guide there could be dozens of different fonts used across Mozilla.
What to do after a proposal was presented was then discussed -- do we
need to vote on things for approval, what to do if a proposal was
accepted or not accepted? We decided to sort these issues out as we
go through things instead of trying to add too much process in
advance.
- Proposed Priorities
Julie recommended looking at a standard footer sooner rather than
later. This would include common legal needs but could also include
design or other considerations. For instance, FuzzyFox is interested
in linking to the new Community Map from the footer so people can see
where they are in the web universe and what other sites are close by.
There was interest in discussing what to do with domain names,
specifically are we moving away from domains based on organizations
(mozilla.com, mozillamessaging.com, etc.) and if so how would that
work. This is something David and John are looking into and want to
make into a proposal but it may not be ready for the next meeting.
Shutting down or making abandoned sites read-only with a notice is
also something to look at but this may be better to turn into a
proposal after the Privacy Friends project is over.
We can also look at Ned's web font proposal and other people are
welcome to make suggestions such as how to improve discoverability
across sites.
- Logistics
We can make use of the existing mozilla-org group for now and create a
separate group as needed.
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.mozilla-org/topics
This time may not work because of potential overlap with the
Director's meeting but we can figure out other times at the next
meeting.
The next meeting will be in two weeks on August 26 and then we'll meet
on the last week of every month after that.