Status of convergence?

[rvagg]

Over at @nodejs/build we had some questions about the status of convergence of this WG, can you fill us in on:

• plans re a unified team looking after the web assets on both domains and progress towards those plans? will the joyent/node-website crew be joining here and will efforts be combined?
• any discussion regarding hosting of the web properties that may have happened here that can feed back in to our discussions on the same?

Ideally we'd like to unify hosting arrangements of the sites so we can have shared HA strategies, although we didn't have @misterdjules with us in the last meeting so we didn't go very deep in to the nodejs.org side of things.

Related, but aside: with the foundation launch this week, a bunch of commits made it in to node-website to make this obvious: https://github.com/joyent/node-website/commits/master - this was a quick pass by @jasnell with some touch-ups from the node-website team afterward but it'd be really nice to see some design love put in on these changes. The new LF header and footer particularly and also the messy logo pot pourri (thankyou @indexzero for that term!) that we have to deal with now.

[bnb]

I literally just opened GitHub to post an issue as an invitation to joyent/node-website for our meeting tomorrow at 17:00GMT.

As far as I'm aware, there has been little or no contact between the two groups, and that needs to change. Again, as far as I know there hasn't been any real progress in moving forward with a unified site - this was something I was hoping we could decide on how to take action in tomorrow's meeting.

[misterdjules]

@bnb Can you post it there? Otherwise not a lot of people involved in joyent/node-website will notice this. I noticed it because @rvagg mentioned me directly.

[bnb]

Posted: nodejs/nodejs.org-archive#137

[misterdjules]

@bnb Thank you 👍

[bnb]

@rvagg So Update time:

In today's Website WG meeting, we came to a few conclusions on convergence of the websites.

• The current nodejs/website repo will move to nodejs/iojs.org or nodejs/iojs.org-website.
• The current joyent/node-website will move to nodejs/nodejs.org.
• The new, collaborative repo will be nodejs/new.nodejs.org.

Eventually, the nodejs/new.nodejs.org will become nodejs/nodejs.org at discretion of the Website WG. It will become the production site, and replace the Joyent precursor.

For development of new.nodejs.org, the Evangelism WG is going to write a blog post requesting a design for the website from the community. This blog post will lead to an issue on nodejs/new.nodejs.org where people can discuss and post designs.

[rvagg]

Awesome!

One suggestion I have from the outside for this process (take it or leave it) is that when the foundation is ticking over and working as it should there will be $$ available to get things done like "professional" design and it may be tempting to lean in to that for the website work. However, as soon as we start paying people to do work we take it off the table for the community and actually decrease the sense of community and collaboration that we engender by sourcing it from volunteer work. If we are able to find great skills and talent from amongst the community then we should embrace that just like we do with open source code contributions rather than taking the easy path because it'll work out best in the long run. I have no doubt that the talent is out there (perhaps already in this WG) but harnessing it is the trick!

I'm doing something similar with the ARM cluster for build where I'm seeking donations from the community and so far almost our entire Pi cluster is built from these donations. There are plenty of people out there ready to contribute and it grows the community and sense of community when we give them the avenue to do so. Raspberry Pis are cheap and I could probably even get away with putting a few down as a company expense but that misses part of the point of what we're doing!

[jasnell]

Visual design is obviously not my strong suit... As evidenced by the
members page. Professional help would definitely be a good thing. Please
keep in mind, however, that use of the logos is governed by contract
agreement between the member organizations and the foundation. The site
cannot use any logo of any member organization without its permission, and
the member organization may establish the terms by which the logo can be
used. No modifications can be made to the logos without consent of the
owning organization. (Cropping white space is OK, but changing colors,
shapes, ratios, etc is not). Many times the organization will provide
multiple versions of their logo. We can pick one of the choices given. If
there are any questions about the logo, contact either Mike Dolan or Todd
Benzies from the LF.
On Jun 17, 2015 3:44 PM, "Rod Vagg" notifications@github.com wrote:

Over at @nodejs/build https://github.com/orgs/nodejs/teams/build we had
some questions about the status of convergence of this WG, can you fill us
in on:

• plans re a unified team looking after the web assets on both domains
  and progress towards those plans? will the joyent/node-website crew be
  joining here and will efforts be combined?
• any discussion regarding hosting of the web properties that may have
  happened here that can feed back in to our discussions on the same?

Ideally we'd like to unify hosting arrangements of the sites so we can
have shared HA strategies, although we didn't have @misterdjules
https://github.com/misterdjules with us in the last meeting so we
didn't go very deep in to the nodejs.org side of things.

Related, but aside: with the foundation launch this week, a bunch of
commits made it in to node-website to make this obvious:
https://github.com/joyent/node-website/commits/master - this was a quick
pass by @jasnell https://github.com/jasnell with some touch-ups from
the node-website team afterward but it'd be really nice to see some design
love put in on these changes. The new LF header and footer particularly and
also the messy logo pot pourri (thankyou @indexzero
https://github.com/indexzero for that term!) that we have to deal with
now.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
nodejs/nodejs.org#385.

[rvagg]

Thanks for clarifying that @jasnell, and please don't take my comments as criticism of your design work! I'm just thinking of you in the same way that I think of myself—an engineer that knows just enough about "design" to be dangerous—and handing off to the real pro's being the optimal path to leveling up.

[bnb]

If we are able to find great skills and talent from amongst the community then we should embrace that just like we do with open source code contributions rather than taking the easy path because it'll work out best in the long run.

This is the exact same sentiment expressed in the WG meeting, but I failed to express it as such. We all support this path, AFAIK.

@jasnell Thanks for letting us know about this! We'll definitely keep it in mind.

[snostorm]

One of the additional next steps is working with the converged Marketing team to come up with a common strategy for branding, style use, etc. One idea I am going to propose once we all meet (marketing + web) is to actually establish a "styleguide" repo which can house some key binary assets, branding guidelines, re-usable classes, etc. The idea being it is easier for an external team (as in, external from the website projects) to maintain these efforts in a centralized place, with the website team, evangelism, marketing, etc. able to then consume the recommendations as they see fit. (The repo could even be published via npm or bower to be a hard dependency to encourage re-use.)

Outside of that we'll need to work with build to setup new.nodejs.org to work in a self-publishing way similar to how nodejs/iojs.org self-publishes. We'll be building this repo out from scratch using our prior work (technical and design) established in both of the two existing website repos.

[snostorm]

FYI although we hadn't really all met until yesterday, there had previously been some light discussion and actions between both teams via some GitHub threads soon after the merge happened:

• An invitation of all {io.js -> nodejs}/website WG members to the Joyent website repo(s)
• The Joyent web team were made members of the `{io.js -> nodejs}/website} team and repo(s)
• An understanding we'd be proceeding forward as one team
• Decisions on renaming the {io.js -> nodejs}/website} repo to be more specific to the io.js fork. This just landed in Rename this repo #356

Some relavent threads:

• nodejs.org #350
• 1st WG meeting post-merger (no new members able to join, but allowed us to plan a few issues) WG Meeting with new merged team (Ratify? Initial Planning, etc.) #352
• 2nd WG meeting post-merger (yesterday) Website WG meeting - 6/18/2015 #382

[snostorm]

Heads up the https://github.com/nodejs/new.nodejs.org repo is now live.

[fhemberger]

Closing this, we're already working on this over at nodejs/new.nodejs.org.