What Needs Doing that Isn’t Being Done?(or, how you can help the umbraco project)

MIsc
13 Core/mvp people met at a country house in Denmark prior to CodeGarden 08 to discuss "What is umbraco". We used the format "Open Space Technology" and these are the minutes from the different sessions.

Chapters

• Chapter 1: What Needs Doing that Isn’t Being Done?(or, how you can help the umbraco project)
• Chapter 2: The Umbraco “elevator speech”
• Chapter 3: Keeping Tabs On Direction - the balance between community and company
• Chapter 4: Improving documentation from the point of a new user/developer/architect
• Chapter 5: Dividing Umbraco be divided into to separate projects
• Chapter 6: Sharing implementation experiences and discussing how to support web builders even better

What Needs Doing that Isn’t Being Done?(or, how you can help the umbraco project)

Present: Doug, Warren, Niels

People often wonder how they could contribute to umbraco. To help people find places in which they might help, we have compiled this preliminary list. Documentation is a big need, in all kinds of ways. So is coding assistance for smaller mashups and packages (or core development, but that's a different topic).

Documentation

• Answer posts on the forum
• Find a organizers for umbraco books (and other documentation projects)
  • Oversee the process, break larger writing project into small pieces that can be written by any number of writers.
• Simplify and promote making umbraco books
  • Make it easier to create a book and do it successfully
    • Modify the forum to add a "create a book from this post" feature
      • Pre-populate with credentials
      • Use a webservice to connect to umbraco site and populate content
  • Think about changing the name from "book", which is just umbraco lingo and not obvious.
  • Mark a book as "under construction" until it is finished
    • Modify the books section to hide/show books that aren't finished. Only completed books are shown by default
• Create a glossary of umbraco lingo and what the terms mean
• Proof-reading is needed to clarify and correct the English
  • On website, in books, in the forthcoming tour area, etc.
  • This will make it easier for people who don't have English as their primary language to write documentation
• User Manual
  • Showing the UI for the content and media sections only, what all the buttons and menus do, etc.
  • Probably written based on the basic Boost site
• Write and re-write content with a "sales-pitchy" style
  • The goal is not to over-sell umbraco or lose the friendly feel, but so that people who read the website and documentation will have a "I'm so glad to be using this product", "I'm proud to be part of the umbraco world" reaction.
• Evaluation tools
  • Web pages, PDFs, videos to help people know what to look at when evaluating umbraco. For example…
    • "If you have 5 minutes, what this"
    • "If you have an hour, read this"
    • "Are you a .net developer? Watch this"
    • "Have you got a day, do this, read this, and watch these"
• Update forum to incorporate "accepted answer" capability
  • Update search to filter only those posts with accepted answers.
  • Accepted answers could ask the answerer to create a book or FAQ or some other type of documentation on the subject.
• Translators for the website into other languages
• Level 2 course workbook
• Whitepapers and case studies

Community

• Start a local user group meetup
  • This is simple… select a venue, set a date at least a month in advance, announce it on the forum.
  • A meetup is successful if even 5 people show up.
  • We'd like to create a simple manual explaining how to organize a meetup.
• Make the forum more community-oriented/"social"
  • Enhance the profiles to show where people live, packages and documentation they've contributed, etc.
  • Integrate Google maps or similar to make it easy to find "who's near me"
• Open up the "snippets" to allow community postings
  • Tag every post and create a tag cloud
  • Registered users can post with login
  • As people find interesting items, they can be posted
    • Such as job posts, screen casts, blog entries, tools, etc.

Coding

• Create packages and nitros
• Encourage people to share their projects and code
• Mashup workers (for lack of a better name)
  • The core team and others have many ideas but not enough time to create these little projects. Mashup workers would create these things, freeing up the core group to focus on the core
  • Someone to keep the list up to date, follow up, etc.

Misc.

• Add "how to contribute" to the website to "advertise" all these needs, who to contact, etc.
• Evangelists and community office people
  • Maybe a local skype phone number per region, answered by a few people, who can answer questions and get people going with umbraco.
  • This could be a good source of work for some freelancers, but the bigger goal is to promote umbraco at the local level