Ben, though your calls for the PM remain unheard, you are 100% right about it anyway. But it only helps once we have an idea and areas (clearly defined) that need improvement.
I usually would call for a brainstorming session along with mindmapping at this point, but well, there is no collaborative mindmapping tool out there yet.
I'd suggest we split up this discussion into questions that need to be answered by the website (after all, it is mainly our content that needs to be improved along with the navigation to it, only after that comes design, name and logo). I created a wiki page, where I would like all to write down questions first and structure them into parts later (https://openacs.org/wiki/Questions). Once we have the questions and the parts, we could use the PM to create an improve openacs.org project and let the volonteers deal with the groups and answer these questions.
This would also be the time to thing about the new design and the name, if need be, so work could be done in parallel.
And once this is done the marketing group can start and get things rolling.
Three things which jump to my mind out of this dicussion:
- Dicusssion forums are for discussions, not collaboratively getting work done. Thats why I started the wiki.
- Volunteers need an easy method of helping out. Docbook is not easy. Coding isn't either. We need to provide them with the tools to make contributions easy (apart from the discussion forum).
- Eat your own dogfood. OpenACS should be one of the showcases for the tool itself. Don't be restrictive on installing packages, just because it might increase the maintainability.
