Community outreach: Surveys & Verbatims

Hello everyone,

First, let's forestall the inevitable argument about the use of "verbatims"
as a noun. There. Thanks. :)

Now, the results of our community outreach efforts over the last two Doc
Sprints may be found in the
Survey<http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Community/Survey/Doc_Sprint/Berlin_2-2013>and
Verbatims<http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Community/Survey/Doc_Sprint/Berlin_2-2013>pages.
Note that the survey covers only the Berlin Doc Sprint of February 8
& 9. Since we only received two responses to the survey from the San
Francisco Doc Sprint on February 23, those results are not evaluated. The
verbatim responses (there, I used it properly) are from both Doc Sprints,
including the observations gathered in San Francisco.

I am reluctant to draw broad conclusions based on the data gathered thus
far. I'd like to wait until the survey is made generally available
(independent of doc sprints and maintained perpetually), to modify the
survey to capture the important issues, and I'd like for us to first
address the more obvious and easy (low-hanging fruit) issues before we
resume surveillance.

That said, based on these results, many of our initial assumptions have
been challenged, and there are some obvious and immediate measures we can
take to make contributing to WebPlatform.org easier for our community - the
aforementioned low-hanging fruit.

*Navigation*

The lack of visibility into site architecture and options is crippling our
ability to find pages, to start working in the wiki, and to participating
in the community. We need a first- and second-tier navigation widget.
Baring that, consider the alternatives mentioned below.

*Search*

Since the problems with navigation are perceived as being insurmountable at
this time, let me humbly suggest that we at least fix our search. We need
to remove the duplication of pages in the search results. We should also
make WPD:* pages available to the index (at least for the time being, while
we are in pre-release mode). I watched a guy nearly loose his temper over
our obvious ineptitude in this area.

*Getting Started*

The path from the home page, or any page, to the Getting Started and
Editor's Guide pages needs to be clearer. Without a navigation widget, we
should consider links in the navigation bar - and remove links that don't
work for the time being:

Docs   Getting Started    Editors Guide    Community Pages    Blog

I'll even take bold flashing red text (a la 1995) seriously at this point.

The Getting Started page needs to be reorganized to present tasks based on
domain expertise, skills, and roles. We should also remove those tasks that
we really don't expect people to perform as they are only cluttering the
page.

* * * * *

The good news is that just fixing these three things will help immensely,
maybe even measurably. In this Friday's teleconference let's talk about how
go about it.

There are dozens of bugs revealed in the
Verbatims<http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Community/Survey/Doc_Sprint/Berlin_2-2013>.
Some exist, some we'll have to create. The remaining work on that page is
to run through the list and assign a bug to each issue or otherwise deal
with it. We can talk about that on Friday, too.

+Scott