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  • Check if links are still up-to-date or content itself is outdated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