OpenWetWare talk:Community Portal v2

I thought it might be useful to have an entire page that just dealt with discussions, rather than trying to fit it into a smaller area. We could lay out the portal with tabs similar to the getting started pages as a way to let users navigate easily. I thought

1. Welcome tab
   • highlighting the ways to help out (kinda like pg3 of the getting started),
2. Common Areas tag
   • point to protocols, eqiup, help pages, categorizing, etc.
   • e.g. how to make a "common protocol" from disparate lab protocols, etc.
3. Discussion
   • The main discussion areas reshma outlined at the bottom of this page. Plus the 5 most recently edited OpenWetWare: pages, just to get people pumped ;)

• Jasonk 23:40, 8 March 2006 (EST):Please give feedback on the idea of 3 tabs on the community portal, etc.
• BC 01:13, 9 March 2006 (EST): This looks nice, although I would prefer to be able to see everything at once. For example, when I go to the community portal I would like to see the what needs doing and the discussion topics at the same time and then pick what interests me. I think the tabs make the most sense for something you want to linearly progress through, such as the getting started page. Essentially, I'd like to be able to click on community portal and see a link to everything that is going on rather than having to click to different pages.

Another option for laying out the discussions would be to copy the Village Pump over at wikipedia. This is how they manage a lot of their temporary discussions but I think its a nice visual layout that we could use for our discussions. Reshma's discussion categories could replace the 6 sections on the top of the table. Not sure that the Village Pump way is better, just another option that we can consider.

• Jasonk 01:24, 9 March 2006 (EST) Yeah, question is whether you can fit everything in a single page and have it not be either too long (scrolling down through 3 pages lengths say) or too condensed (can see everything but have no idea what it means). Of course 3 tabs is the same amt of content as a long page - just think it looks nicer visually/organizationally. I like the village pump layout of the graphical boxes, though would be cool to have boxes that are big enough to fit a few of the subcategories reshma has been adding to each of the areas.
  • Jasonk 01:30, 9 March 2006 (EST): This also brings up the question of the purpose of the community portal. I was looking at it mainly as a way to recruit new power users and point them to areas they might want to contribute. I was assuming current power users would only visit the community portal to curate it, rather than to find what's going on today. I think that would occur mostly through SpecialRecentChanges pages pointing at the various discussion areas (e.g. OpenWetWare:Information Management, etc) That may not be the right approach though....

• Jennyn 02:29, 9 March 2006 (EST): I agree with Barry in that I like to see everything on one page. I checked out the Village Pump, and it looked confusing, but I generally like to use color to categorize items so that when a user comes back to the page, they associate a particular section with a color or landmark of some sort (i.e. George's icons to the main page have made it easier to locate items with the image). I was thinking about using that idea with the different discussions on the Community Portal.
  • Jennyn 03:26, 9 March 2006 (EST): I also think it is important to be consistent in the structure of our content. Changing from one template to another may be confusing to a new user. To recruit users in becoming power users, we should make everything as easy as possible to SCAN (not read), ACCESS, and EDIT.
    We can start by standardizing our language (wrt: titles, descriptions, etc). Brevity is key!

1. Use short, incomplete sentences (Attention Retention!)
2. Memorable/comprehensive link title (we've got this one down)
3. Begin phrases with positive imperative action verbs (i.e. Contribute to OWW)
4. Short phrases[math]\displaystyle{ \rightarrow }[/math]Less line breaks[math]\displaystyle{ \rightarrow }[/math]More info/page[math]\displaystyle{ \rightarrow }[/math]Easy to scan![math]\displaystyle{ \rightarrow }[/math]Easy to access![math]\displaystyle{ \rightarrow }[/math]Easy to edit![math]\displaystyle{ \rightarrow }[/math]Power Users++!
5. Typically, we retain [math]\displaystyle{ 7\pm2 }[/math] units of information. So, this line is just for looks.