Website and Services: Review and future steps

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  • Check if links are still up-to-date or content itself is outdated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):