Constituencies
Users
Organization and creation of content to make being a user easier.
Users on the verge of becoming contributors
.ORG acts as "user advocates" in making sure some response to patches and other potential contributions occurs. By ignoring potential contributors, we stand to alienate them forever. Even a negative reply with constructive criticism is better than no response. Each project ultimately still has to judge the contributions for themselves, we won't apply patches. But our job is to make sure that users who are on the verge of becoming contributors get special hand-holding to ensure their contributions don't fall through the cracks.
Developers who care and cooperate
Primarily we need to give them the good tooling to do their jobs. Better blogging experience.
Additionally, both visual and content style guides would help developers who are trying to create their own content. We will still groom and organize everything, but if style guides and point people in the correct direction, the better.
Developers who care and are frustrated to the point of not cooperating
This group will take time to prove we're trying to remove their frustrations. Improving the tooling to entice them back to .ORG instead of off-shore rogue tooling is ultimately the end-game for this group. We cannot force folks to use our facilities. We must entice.
Developers who don't care
Unfortunately, here we have to pick up the slack and continuous try to educate by example as to why it's important to care. Ultimately, there are benefits to caring, in terms of growing both the contributor and user bases.
.ORG Initiatives
Style guides
A Visual style guide and library of HTML/CSS snippets to make it easier for projects to conform to a consistent look-and-feel.
A Writing style to explain how we prefer to do documentation and other written materials. Not dis-similar to the Red Hat style guide, but more comprehensive, perhaps. Could perhaps include advice as to structure/form for documents, in addition to more general voice/personality advice.
Training/Educating about Community Values
Bob will write blogs/documents in digestible nuggets to examine best practices, advice and suggestions for projects interacting with their community.
Tooling
We will prioritize development on our tooling. Certain functionality and hot-issues should be bumped to the top of the task lists for each component, to try to win back frustrated developers
Additionally, we need to create additional tooling to support the development process, including:
Release process (web, blogs, announcements, downloads)
JIRA wishlist portlets
Project Shepherding
We will take on a project every (2 weeks? month?) to provide intense effort and mentoring. Particularly for those projects that seem to not care about community. Ultimately, this should be cycling and wrap back around each (six months? year?) for continuous improvement.
Additionally, we will reach out to the appropriate sneezers in the community (the press, notable bloggers, etc) when important releases occur. While marketing may handle GA release, a lot of beta/RC releases are also considered "important" to the community. RC releases are particularly important as getting a lot of users on the RC helps shake out any bugs before GA.
Meatspace
We need schwag.
We need to attend conferences where our human community goes.
TSSJS
JavaOne
JUGs
JBUGs
Content
The role of content in the new jboss.org site should be to provide clear, concise and correct information for the successful development of the jboss.org projects. In particular the release of the new site should be used as an opportunity to refocus efforts on the development of Java Enterprise Middleware, clarify the role of the community and streamline the contribution process. These objectives could be achieved for example by removing the JBoss Labs project from the main project list and stating our governance model for contributions.
In order to provide valuable content it is important to recognize what not to include. For example the restructuring of the site to focus on Java Enterprise Middleware together with a clear overview means there is little value in explaining the reasons behind the decision. This type of content will be provided by the media if necessary.
Finally the tone of the content should work in concert with the visual style to ensure a consistent feel to the site.
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