Suggestion: New TWiki Community Web

I just attended the TWiki Community Summit in Sunnyvale, at which the question of marketing and promotong TWiki came up.

I see that

• TWiki community
• TWiki marketing
• TWiki advocacy

But what would cause someone new to TWiki to come to the Codev web in the first place?

When you land on TWiki.org, you see

• Blog web
• Bugs web
• Codev web
  • Developers news
  • Freetown release
• Main web
• Plugins web
  • Add-on packages
  • Plugin packages
  • Skin packages
• Sandbox web
• Support web
• TWiki web

There's a lot of information for developers: Bugs, Codev, Plugins, Support. There's a "Main" web (isn't that where I am now? If not, why not?), a "Sandbox" (wth?) and a TWiki web (duh??).

But where's "Getting Started"? Where's Community?

The Codev web is traditionally the place where the community info is, but until Thursday, I thought Codev meant Code! It may mean Co-development, but to many people, development means code! Look at how the Codev web describes itself (emphasis changed/mine)

The Codev web is the main collaboration area for TWiki development, open to end user with comments and suggestions, to site managers & coordinators developing TWiki installations from a non-technical, browser-based tool approach, and to software developers* interested in discussing and contributing to the code keeping in mind the TWikiMission.

I think if we want to promote TWiki as a valuable addition to to users web tools, we need a Community web. We need to move the Advocacy, Marketing, and Community pages to the Community web. We need to put the Success stories in the Community web. -- Contributors: VickiBrown - 17 Feb 2008

Discussion

There is currently a redesign effort going on, providing entry points into the twiki.org site: NewNavigationModelForTWikiDotOrg. I believe your concern will be addressed there. We did a thorough job of analysing who the visitors to twiki.org might be, and how to get them the information they need efficiently.

Recently, Michael Corbet also suggested a new web: the Marketing web. It got rejected, some of the arguments as to why can be found in the TWikiOrgRenewalWorks topic under 'I want a new web' and in the irc logs of the marketing meetings.

Myself, i'm undecided on the issue, and would probably welcome a the splitting of coding and other community activities. The Codev web is a scary place indeed! Try to get a WebIndex of the Codev web for example

-- KoenMartens - 17 Feb 2008

After spending my Sunday searching for and trying to update the all the topics that reference our SVN server, I would Love to see some serious removal of topics. I seriously don't see any continued benefit the topics that reference the cvs setup (most are now just stubs saying that they are not relevant anymore). I think that we should consider using twiki.org as a Wiki, where discussions are transient, and completed works can be pushed to one side.

Considering how few developers there are relative to users - and I hope that continues - I struggle to see why we force the majority to wade through so much gumpf that is important to working out howto develop new things.

-- SvenDowideit - 18 Feb 2008

I have been suggesting removing directly wrong topics for years.

I'd rather have a 404 than directly wrong information.

Every time we get the request for a new web the reason is the same. Start on a fresh. But that is not the right way. It still leaves all the wrong information in the Codev web. To avoid the 404 issue (Cool URLs don't change) we should simply totally empty the Codev topics that are right out wrong so they so not appear in search results. Just marking them obsolete is a bad solution because you then still get them when you keyword search. Best is to delete the content and replace it by a simple pointer to the best matching newer topic.

-- KennethLavrsen - 20 Feb 2008

I completely agree with Vicki. We can’t keep on stuffing everything in the Codev web and hoping that people will be able to find things. One of TWiki’s strengths is the ability to create webs and yet we don’t seem to be exploiting this strength.

There have been many other instances of people asking for new webs and not getting them despite putting up (IMHO) a valid, reasoned argument. I put up a topic, MarketingWebBenefits which got good support but, despite no one advancing any arguments why we shouldn’t get a new web it got blocked. And I wasn’t the first. Meredith Lesley created the topic DiscussionAboutNewTWikiWebs and, whilst I wasn’t really on the TWiki train at the time and so wasn’t involved in the discussion, I believe that it also got a pretty stony reception.

I believe that this comes down to a lack of process for determining – as a community – how we handle requests like this. But its not just new webs. There are a whole host of decisions that must be made and I started documenting these in CommunityDecisions. Doesn’t the fact that the same problems come up time and time again suggest that we need to look at this decision making process?

-- MichaelCorbett - 20 Feb 2008

During the time I have been on the TWiki project we have had a request for a new web every 2nd month or so. I remember counting how many Meredith proposed. I believe she requested a total of 5 new webs - in 5 months.

If we made a new web each time someone proposes it, we would have 50 webs now with totally overlapping scopes which means I would have to search in 5 or 10 webs instead of 1.

New webs does not remove the need to clean up in Codev web.

It is not that new webs cannot be created. We created the new Blog web and the Apps web will be created shortly. In both cases there is a valid need for unique name spaces.

I do not see a problem with splitting Codev. But I fail to see why a small topic like e.g. Marketing should deserve its own web (small in terms of the number of topics we expect to see). If we create new webs to split Codev then we need to define some mutually exclusive (you always know which web to go to) buckets of significant size - and someone needs to commit to manually copy content to the new webs and mark the old topics moved (empty the content with pointer to new web).

An alternative is to start using Sub webs so that Codev topics can be moved to subwebs that for specific web applications like "feature proposals", "community decision proposals" could be moved to sub webs.

-- KennethLavrsen - 20 Feb 2008