Invitation to Webmasters meeting, Wed Oct 6 at 7:00 PM

[Rod Clark]

   This has been announced in various places before, but here
are some more recent details. 

-----
Webmasters and Topic Editors Meeting

        Wednesday, October 6, 7:00 - 9:00 PM
        U. Village QFC, upstairs meeting room at north end

   Everyone who's interested in the SCN Web site is welcome,
including those who haven't been active lately.

   We hope to have a from-the-ground-up discussion. Afterward,
we might be able to break up into working groups and continue to
10:00 PM in the meeting room, or move some of that to a coffee
shop nearby. Anyway, we'll continue over the next few months
with meetings of some smaller working groups of people
interested in particular areas.

   Some of the purposes of this meeting are to

1. Get more people involved in the Web site. Figure out how
   people can hand off tasks to new volunteers and collaborate
   effectively with them.

2. Identify tasks within Webmasters that require different kinds
   of talents, and organize working groups around them. Do this
   in ways that can scale up as the site grows and more people
   become involved and the complexity of SCN's Web services
   increases.

3. Discuss what qualifications are needed for roles such as
   Community Pages topic editors. Figure out how people should
   be selected for those roles. Discuss how the results of their
   activites should be evaluated and by whom, so that volunteers
   can take on wider responsibilities or scale back their
   activities to what they can comfortable handle. 

4. Agree on some realistic guidelines for the number of hours
   per week needed for tasks such as topic editing. Figure out
   ways that people can move in and out of active roles
   according to the time they currently have available. 

   The Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) has come up with
   some ways to do this with a similar but much larger volunteer
   project. Take a look and see what you think of how they
   organize their volunteer editors.

5. Toward the end of the meeting, initially hand out the tasks
   sketched out below (or however we try structuring the
   committee for a while) to some qualified people who have the
   time to devote to them and who are willing to get together
   with others who are interested in working on those areas.
   Especially do this with the Community Pages, to cover all of
   the topic sections if at all possible, instead of just some
   of them.

6. Continue refining whatever rough beginnings we have by the
   end of the meeting, through discussion on the Webmasters list
   and at meetings of various more specific task groups.

   Here are some notes on how we might organize some working
groups within Webmasters. Please add your thoughts to this.

Researchers - 

- Web researchers are SCN volunteers and members of the public
  who search for good local resources and submit them for
  inclusion in the SCN menus. Most of the time, most researchers
  would do this in one or more subject areas of particular
  interest to them.

- Researchers also may be asked to do directed research about
  certain subjects, to better fill out areas identified by the
  webmaster and the topic editors.

- No minimum time commitment is required to be a researcher.
  (You're all invited to go on a research binge, to help us
  update SCN's menus.)

- Researchers, after producing some amount of good results, are
  eligible to become topic editors. Since that would mean a more
  consistent and greater time commitment, some researchers might
  be just as happy not to become editors.

Topic Editors - 

- Editors are SCN volunteers with a generalist ability to
  evaluate and select content that supports SCN's purposes.
  Ideally at least one editor in each Community Pages subject
  area would have some current expert knowledge about that
  subject, and extensive community connections with it.

- Editors review suggestions submitted by researchers and the
  public, and also periodically review existing content.

- Editors of broad topic sections should be able to spend at
  least several hours a week reviewing content and making
  substantial menu updates. Editors of smaller sections of the
  menus within each topic section can take a more relaxed
  approach.

- If we have enough qualified people, we could assign more than
  one editor to popular and busy categories. But sometimes there
  might be fewer editors than topics, as there are now. It's
  probably more important to find people who can do well at it
  than to have a one-to-one correspondence between editors and
  menus.

SCNA Pages group - 

- Develop content that describes SCN's services, and explains
  the SCN Association and its activities. 

- Assist the Help editor and help file writers to publish the
  documentation that they produce. Producing enough good help
  files and keeping them updated is going to be a large and
  difficult project.

- Help other SCN committees and any SCNA special projects to set
  up their Web pages.

Personal Pages group -

- Provide a section of the site that features SCN users'
  personal sites. Organize and promote this part of the site.

- In cooperation with Web Design, Web Programming and SCN's
  users themselves, make available and support user-friendly
  tools that will make it easy to build personal Web sites on
  SCN.

Web Design - 

- The Web Design people are designers, usability specialists,
  librarians and artists, rather than programmers.

- Design the look and feel of the Web site to improve its
  usability and function, while listening to the technical
  people about what is practical.

- Identify and sketch out better Web services that could be
  offered to users, and oversee usability testing.

- Keep an eye on the taxonomic organization of the site and
  advise the topic editors about effectively organizing
  information.

Web programming - 

- Write and adapt programming to run SCN's Web-based services.

- Advise Operations about the system changes necessary to offer
  better Web services.

Webmasters Committee, and Webmaster -

- The Webmasters are people who are interested in the overall
  organization of the above activities.

- Follow up with the different Web groups to develop ways of
  working together and accomplishing their objectives. Find ways
  to effectively interact with other SCN committees such as
  Volunteer Coordination, Information Provider Coordination and
  Operations.

- Introduce new volunteers to tasks, and make sure that they
  have something interesting and worthwhile to do right away.
  (This is too often neglected at present.)

- Support any of SCN's other activities with the Web services
  that they need.

- The Webmasters committee periodically elects the SCN
  Webmaster, subject to approval by the Executive Committee. The
  Webmaster attends monthly Excomm meetings, coordinates the
  committee's activities, encourages people to communicate with
  one another, and keeps people focused on things that the
  committee and SCN have decided to do. If you want to do this,
  please nominate yourself as soon as humanly possible. Argh.

Rod Clark

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