Website and Services: Review and future steps

Open Source Design meta
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Our website has aged in the recent years. This post is to collect relevant information and collect community input and needs.

Current State

  • Our website’s code is on github. There are (at writing) about 50 open issues tracked.
  • There is also the jobs page. One can generate git commits from a form and the jobs page renders a list of jobs. Jobs need to be removed manually.
  • There is also this discourse, but thats hosted for us by discourse. Nice.

Future concerns

There are some some broad concerns

  • What should the website provide? There is a lot of potential concent, but anything thats not our own content (and sometimes even that) needs to be maintained (e.g. links checked and updated)
  • How to make the website easy to change and adapt?
  • How to deal with dynamic content like the job board? It poses some challenges, since running it both needs some expert knowledge (in Heroku, I think?) as well as payment for Heroku.

Research/Input

  • I am not aware of us doing any tracking or other measurement
  • There is a post on what OSD does for community members with some input.
  • We could also consider running a survey on community needs and current use of the website.

Existing maintanance work

Currently the following tasks need to be done regularly with/for/in our website infrastructure:

  • Clean out old jobs in the repo: Asking if they should be still up, close if not
  • Fix website HTML, CSS if bugs are found
  • Check if links are still up-to-date or content itself is outdated
  • Moderate the forum
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  • Github issues: Most of them are several years old. I would love to find out if there are any clusters of issues based on the tag, but so far my visualization attempts were not successful.
  • I also noted that the infrastructure tends to be hard to understand (for me at least!), its very bricolage-y. Might be good to list the different services, bots, interfaces to see what we need and to document them in a way that prevents only single people being able to deal with it.
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I would love to find out if there are any clusters of issues based on the tag

Here’s a quick tag cloud of open issues’ labels with their frequencies (there’s two issues with no label not shown here):

Screenshot from 2025-04-17 11-23-40
Screenshot from 2025-04-17 11-23-40741×388 47.2 KB

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Thank you, Jan, for sharing your thoughts. In my impression there is either not much life in this community or it happens anywhere else. If that’s true, then we should first get clear about our vision and future plans for this community.
But maybe my impression is wrong and somebody could clarify this.

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Yep - it’s a $5.00 cost and knowing how Heroku + our various bots talk to each other

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Website user here: I have found this site to be very difficult to navigate and very confusing to find information. Here are some issues I have found:

  1. No organization structure to the content: I see a strange mix up of dates across the years, but it’s not organised in any order.
  2. Replies don’t show properly - I have to go to the thread and only then see the reply.
  3. Jobs are sometimes scattered across the forums and jobs section. I nearly missed a posting because that job was not listed in the jobs section.
  4. Limited responses to questions - I have asked questions to people posting jobs and posted here previously but did rarely do I get a response. It could be either due to low participation or a combination of 1,2 and 3.

I think an issue might be a logical structuring of the content and the metadata behind it because the indexing is currently way off. I’m not an expert on this topic but if there is someone with information architecture experience then I’d be glad to dig through the site. On the UI front there are also some issues as some of the interactive elements seem a bit clunky.

@jdittrich what are some issues you are seeing? What is the user feedback like so far?

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