Re: Re: Re: We need a more UI-friendly group

The original concerns raised in Abhimanyu's email are valid.

We do need better ways for contributers to collaborate, such as to ask for
reviews or second opinions.  Preferably the system would have a friendly
user interface and the ability to share files, get user's attention, and so
on, while maintaining a record of all work and discussions.

Facebook is not an option for an official WPD forum, for all the reasons
others have mentioned: it is not publicly archived for non-users, it is
dependent on a particular company's rules and regulations, and not everyone
can or would want to join Facebook.  As Garbee suggested, you are welcome
to make an unofficial WPD discussion facebook group, just like Twitter
users are welcome to use the #WPD or #WPDS tags (both are used during web
platform doc sprints).

Rather than debate that, I would like to suggest an alternate solution:
http://project.webplatform.org/  This project tracker system already exists
as part of Web Platform.

Anyone can sign up, and in the future it will be directly tied in to the
sign in to other Web Platform features (for now, *please use the same
username* so that your accounts can be merged later).

It supports discussion on topics (with file attachments), that are open and
accessible to everyone, but you won't have to worry about drowning the
mailing list with discussions of particular details between a small number
of collaborators.  Users can control whether they get email notifications
for various types of activity.

It's certainly not a complete project management and collaboration system,
*yet*.  But it could be.

The re-organization that was started last summer was intended to change it
from a (poorly used) bug-reporting system to a project planning system,
based on overarching goals (epics) projects (stories) and tasks.  There is
also the possibility of creating "teams" that could be automatically
notified about certain types of issues; these could also serve as a record
of members able to help with certain types of work, such as a request for
review.

It's not a wonderful UI -- that landing page isn't very friendly -- but
there have been plans to improve it and more suggestions and participation
would be encouraged.  Renoir has been working hard to streamline the
backend build process so that it is easier for other contributors to submit
changes to the infrastructure code, for this and the rest of the site.

*I would encourage you all to take a look at the system.  Try to identify
ways in which it could be more useful as a project hub.*  The system uses
The Bug Genie (http://www.thebuggenie.com/), so you might want to look up
their documentation to figure out what is or isn't possible.

Best regards,
Amelia BR