Shared website development and/or hosting

Sun Nov 18 10:58:20 UTC 2012

It always gets interesting when you start to discuss the details =)

Why we should to this
-------------------------------
### For all LoCo members and contributors
1) Show that we are all a part of something bigger than our own LoCos.

2) A common website would make it more obvious across the borders what
the others are up to (IRL Meetings and other online/offline events).

3) We are a few active in each LoCo. If these "few" work together and
get inspired by each other I think we can achieve more than we do
today in each LoCo.

### For developers and administrators (incl. moderators)
4) Develop/maintain and contribute to same codebase. (If we can come
up with something awesome, beautiful and easy to install it might even
be possible that other LoCos, outside of Nordic, join only for this
part).

5) Shared hosting can perhaps lower our total costs. (I have no
information/statistics on this one).

6) More people that can help out in case of failures e.g. when a
database goes down.

What I think the end result should include
-----------------------------------------------------------
If we decide to go for one website together (this would mean that we
close down our now running websites/forums) these are the parts I see
as a must.

    * LoCo news in English from all LoCos
    * LoCo planet with blogs from all LoCo members in the nordic
countries (no restriction on languages).
    * Forum with english main section as well as other forum sections
which are language specific.
    * Wiki in english with walkthrough and tutorials.

As I see it we all would have to contribute with news and content in
English (so at least a few in all countries would understand it) and a
main feature of the website would be translation support of all parts.
As two examples. All news are posted in english first but then it is
easy for any member to translate to their own language. All wiki-pages
are first created in english and then any member can translate to
their own language.

Only the forum would be without translation specific features as I do
not see any purpose with that when there are specific sections for
english and other nordic languages.

How we can do this
----------------------------
I like agile development and to show something that runs and start
broader discussions when I have something concrete to talk about, that
is why I suggested to start with collaboration on the codebase. One
way to start is actually to just gather all code we have now in the
different LoCos under one project on Launchpad. This would make it
easier to compare the different systems that runs now.

Above I talk about the scenario to move everything to a common
website. Another option and also a step to a common website might be
to aggregate news, forum posts and what not to ubuntu-nordic.org. In
this scenario we would keep everything we have today and just
propagate content to a common website.

In the end I feel that the most important thing is that the webpage is
active and do not have too much static content that needs an
administrator/dedicated news writer to keep up to date. The main
purpose a community website like ubuntu-nordic.org should have is to
advocate the community and not the software.

Regards
--
Christoffer Holmstedt

2012/11/16 Titanus Eramius <titanus at aptget.dk>:
> On Fri, 16 Nov 2012 11:57:38 +0200
> Pasi Lallinaho <pasi at shimmerproject.org> wrote:
>
>> On 16/11/12 10:34, Jesper Jarlskov wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 11:49 PM, Pasi Lallinaho
>> > <pasi at shimmerproject.org <mailto:pasi at shimmerproject.org>> wrote:
>> >
>> >     On 11/15/2012 10:36 PM, Titanus Eramius wrote:
>> >     > On Thu, 15 Nov 2012 21:32:57 +0200
>> >     > Jussi Kekkonen <tmt at ubuntu.com <mailto:tmt at ubuntu.com>> wrote:
>> >     >
>> >     >> The biggest "why" for me is the fact that maintaining the
>> >     >> platform (themes etc) and content tends to take more work
>> >     >> than there's
>> >     doers.
>> >     >> If basic contents would be done with bigger team,
>> >     >> translations
>> >     would
>> >     >> be easy to do and more easily organised than creating
>> >     >> contents from scratch. All the rest is easily thrown to wiki
>> >     >> I'd say.
>> >     >>
>> >     > In this I agree 100% and I think it should be the main reason
>> >     > for working towards a common site. In DK we have around ~350
>> >     > active members, but only 2 admins and 2 mods, which (in my
>> >     > opinion)
>> >     means some
>> >     > things just don't get done.
>> >     >
>> >     > However, I too disagrees in having one forum only, since a
>> >     > fair
>> >     part of
>> >     > the danish users don't do english (at all). One solution
>> >     > might be to have 5 "top level forums", so one first chooses
>> >     > language (DK,
>> >     SE, NO,
>> >     > FI and EN*), and then can browse the localized forum.
>> >
>> >     I'd like to keep the forums discussion separate from this
>> > website discussion. I don't personally have any motivation to
>> > pursue a shared forum, even with areas for all different languages.
>> >
>> >
>> > I agree, lets not focus on a common forum.
>> >
>> >     > My rationale for thinking this way is the great value of past
>> >     threads
>> >     > in a forum, and collecting the knowledge of Scandinavia
>> >     > within one site would be reason enough for me to work towards
>> >     > one site.
>> >     Having all
>> >     > this in one place, would also mean the search-function would
>> >     > show results from all of the forums.
>> >     >
>> >     > A large site like this, would also be able to have a wiki and
>> >     > other nice things which we currently don't have in DK because
>> >     > we lack manpower.
>> >
>> >     I'm not sure wiki should in the scope of this discussion
>> > either, but that's of course possible later. But why would we
>> > want/need a shared wiki?
>> >
>> >
>> > I am a bit confused here, then. It seems I have missed the kind of
>> > information you would present on the site.
>>
>> General information about Ubuntu, how to obtain it, ... I think this
>> is pretty much what LoCos have on their sites already.
>
> I'm getting more confused by the message.
>
> Here in DK the forum takes ~65% of all the traffic to our
> site, which means that the forum is what most of our users are
> interested in, and in second places comes the "Guides & Articles"
> Wordpress-section with ~15% of the hits, hence the recommendation to
> have a wiki.
>
> So the forum is really our main asset, and building yet another site
> with static information seems kind of lame. Why not use
> ubuntu-nordic.org for that?
>
> It might just be me, but I don't see the point in this. There is plenty
> of static information about Ubuntu online, and I think the reason that
> people use the forums, is because they can't use that static
> information. It might be to hard, ambiguous or in the wrong language.
> The site we discus here would only solve the last problem.
>
> Even though we don't end up working toward a common site, it would
> still be an advantage to share the code for the websites, but that
> implies we can agree to work on a common platform, or at least parts of
> a common platform.
>
> Med venlig hilsen Nicky
>
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