A /technology page

[konklone]

If there's support for it, I'd like to take a stab at a /technology page for the site, that projects a clear image to the techies of the world of how we work. Unlike other pages on the site, it'd freely use tech nomenclature that on other pages might not work well.

It would do a few things:

• We're an all-open-source, all-public-domain shop. (Link to our policy page.)
• We're an all-SSL shop. (Possibly with a link to something separate I'm working on about why that's a good thing.)
• We use cloud services and open stacks. (Regular AWS, nginx, Ubuntu.)
• We love pull requests as a public service. We're on GitHub, watch us there, help us out.

And if we can figure out a way to guarantee this (cc @seanherron):

• We're an all IPv6 shop, because it's goddamn important.

[gbinal]

Sounds like a great idea.

[aaronsnow]

FWIW: I don't know if this belongs on the same /technology page or on
another page, but a while back we talked about a call-to-action page where
the action is basically "come code with us," but with some conversion
funnel design thinking. So instead of saying, "we love PRs, so go wander
through our repos 'til you find something you can do," actively give them
the info they need and tools to sift through it -- e.g., a skills-matching
widget for coders who want to contribute but don't know which projects use
the languages/tools they know, so if you type or choose "python," it'd
filter to show you only the projects that use Python. Or maybe it's browse
by stacks or by stack elements instead of search -- you get the idea. The
idea is to lower the barrier to entry, so we don't lose people who want to
help but don't know where to start. The hypothesis is that there are people
out there who want to help but aren't being sufficiently guided into the
right specific situations.

[konklone]

That's a great idea - maybe a better use of 18f.github.io than just a pretty way of listing an active subset of our repos?

[aaronsnow]

Love that idea. Maybe send folks there from 18f.gsa.gov/participate or
something along those lines as well.

(It'd be great to have a funnel for non-technical folks eventually, too. I
don't know quite what that looks like -- maybe opportunities could include
stuff like content and doc editing, data gathering, a way to volunteer for
usability studies if PRA doesn't bar it ...)

[adelevie]

Is this related to that tool mozilla open sourced?

cc @gbinal

On Jul 9, 2014, at 10:11 PM, Aaron Snow notifications@github.com wrote:

FWIW: I don't know if this belongs on the same /technology page or on
another page, but a while back we talked about a call-to-action page where
the action is basically "come code with us," but with some conversion
funnel design thinking. So instead of saying, "we love PRs, so go wander
through our repos 'til you find something you can do," actively give them
the info they need and tools to sift through it -- e.g., a skills-matching
widget for coders who want to contribute but don't know which projects use
the languages/tools they know, so if you type or choose "python," it'd
filter to show you only the projects that use Python. Or maybe it's browse
by stacks or by stack elements instead of search -- you get the idea. The
idea is to lower the barrier to entry, so we don't lose people who want to
help but don't know where to start. The hypothesis is that there are people
out there who want to help but aren't being sufficiently guided into the
right specific situations.
—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[aaronsnow]

Not that I know of. What tool is that @adelevie?

[adelevie]

https://github.com/gbinal/asknot

On Jul 9, 2014, at 11:33 PM, Aaron Snow notifications@github.com wrote:

Not that I know of. What tool is that @adelevie?
—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[gbinal]

@adelevie - yes, it is. In fact, it's not just opensourced, but I believe that it's being hosted out of github pages. So, making a variant for ourselves should be v. easy.

[ultrasaurus]

I'd like to see some of this language on our home page. Why not appeal to
techies too? It should link elsewhere so it doesn't alienate folks, and I
love the idea of a deeper dive somewhere. I'd also love to see technical
blog posts (could be filtered into a separate category) that appears on
this same page... or maybe this could be an inaugural technical blog post?

Sarah

---

Sarah Allen
(202) 495-9831
https://18f.gsa.gov/

On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 4:05 PM, Eric Mill notifications@github.com wrote:

If there's support for it, I'd like to take a stab at a /technology page
for the site, that projects a clear image to the techies of the world of
how we work. Unlike other pages on the site, it'd freely use tech
nomenclature that on other pages might not work well.

It would do a few things:

• We're an all-open-source, all-public-domain shop. (Link to our
  policy page.)
• We're an all-SSL shop. (Possibly with a link to something separate
  I'm working on about why that's a good thing.)
• We use cloud services and open stacks. (Regular AWS, nginx, Ubuntu.)
• We love pull requests as a public service. We're on GitHub, watch us
  there, help us out.

And if we can figure out a way to guarantee this (cc @seanherron
https://github.com/seanherron):

• We're an all IPv6 shop, because it's goddamn important.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#100.

[konklone]

I'd also love to see technical blog posts (could be filtered into a separate category)

I agree wholeheartedly, and in fact I think we should feel comfy doing occasional technical posts on the official 18F blog. FOIA team has a tech/product blog planned that will absorb FOIA-specific tech posts, and allow us to publish them more often to a narrower audience.

And yeah, we should definitely have a bit of this language on the homepage - there's nothing much there right now that speaks to the developers we're hoping to inspire and recruit.

[quepol]

@gbinal has been working on a /developers page -- how about using that nomenclature and fleshing out that page a bit? I liked what Hawaii.gov put together when they launched their Jekyll-based "stynamic" stack.

[quepol]

@ultrasaurus can you start a new issue re. filtering technical blog posts? we can discuss in that thread about how to display them, what to do, etc. great idea.

[quepol]

@aaronsnow @konklone can y'all flesh out the idea of how to funnel folks to good project in an issue on the 18f.github.io repo. @leahbannon has taken the lead on starting down that path, and i agree this would be a great addition to that.

[polastre]

for @ultrasaurus @quepol: the github blog does a good job of organizing and categorizing blog posts with a relatively easy design IMO.

[ultrasaurus]

done: #112

---

Sarah Allen
(202) 495-9831
https://18f.gsa.gov/

On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Hillary Hartley notifications@github.com
wrote:

@ultrasaurus https://github.com/ultrasaurus can you start a new issue
re. filtering technical blog posts? we can discuss in that thread about how
to display them, what to do, etc. great idea.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#100 (comment).

[konklone]

This hasn't gone anywhere, so I'm going to be as brutal here as I have on other people's tickets, and close it in favor of concrete action.

And on that note, I plan to work on an open source page, and a separate SSL page, after we get our Jekyll version deployed.