0.13.08

Goals for this release.

Work duration: August.

Themes: make the site more usable for new participants, including improving the missions and other frontend parts. We also have a meta-theme of trying to produce a successful release, aiming for a list of reasonable bugs that would be thrilling to see fixed in this release cycle.

Bugtracker list of issues in this release: https://openhatch.org/bugs/milestone17?@template=open

Participants in the planning meeting on August 6: aldeka, britta, IShadowed, paulproteus, m_stone, maackk. Log of meeting: http://irclogs.jackgrigg.com/irc.freenode.net/openhatch/2013-08-07

paulproteus helping integrate new components
"One major focus of mine is getting daveeloo_'s work (called "greenhouse") and sunu's work on new improved training missions solid enough to land in the main website. Greenhouse is a Debian-specific (for now) toolkit for making a todo list of people who contributed to the project, oriented around letting people create "Member Encouragement Teams" within their projects (e.g. within Debian)."

People interested in UX organizing UX efforts
Here are the "usability" tickets that are already filed.

m_stone asked "Have we gotten all of Heather + Flora's feedback into an actionable form?" and paulproteus replied: "The part from PyCon sprints, yes, it's all in the glorious bug tracker." Is there more UX feedback hiding somewhere that isn't integrated into the bug tracker yet?

aldeka is interested in prioritization of existing feedback + finding ways to get more people looped in changing things.

m_stone, aldeka, and paulproteus would like to have another conversation at a convenient time on how to get the UX patch stream flowing more smoothly.

maackk said: Since I'm new to the openhatch UI, I'd be happy to write out a couple goals that a user might have in using the site, and try to perform them myself. (it sounds like that's what http://lists.openhatch.org/pipermail/devel/2013-August/003231.html was suggesting, so maybe that would be helpful?)

britta is interested in doing more user testing to help identify what's important.

Mission-related items
Context from paulproteus: See https://oppiaserver.appspot.com/ + http://code.google.com/p/oppia/. Improving existing missions is fine and useful to do pre-oppia-ification. Writing new ones slightly less so, but writing what I call plot lines (as in, the text that we expect people to go through) for new ones seems totally doable pre-oppia-ification. It'd be great if sunu's oppia-ification of /missions/ can land this month. We also have to decide what the UI of the new training missions will look like. I guess there's no bug filed for this yet. There was a thread on Devel, I think that basically sunu and I settled on, "Port the code for now, and we'll use the default Oppia UI for now", but we'll need to have some kind of reasonable plan for that before it lands. If people here who care about UI want to play with Oppia and the existing missions, then you'll know enough to have opinions on that.

Bugs in existing missions:
 * IShadowed is interested in fixing "Distinguish the differences between commit types in git mission", to help make sure mission instructions are clear.
 * She is also interested in fixing "Suggest follow-up material at the end of the git mission".

New mission suggestions:
 * IShadowed is interested in writing a new mission for "Students should not be expected to know shell".

Other front-end items

 * Usability: https://github.com/openhatch/oh-mainline/pull/123 AKA http://openhatch.org/bugs/issue870 would be great to close this month. That one's in progress by ArcTanSusan (that's her IRC nick anyway).


 * Content: "Twitter demo in Boston Python Workshop teaching material may be broken" should get fixed.

Bug importer items
There's two serious oh-bugimporters (code that goes and downloads bugs from various projects' bug trackers) issues. http://openhatch.org/bugs/issue871 (Google Code doesn't work anymore) and http://openhatch.org/bugs/issue872 (trivial issue in Bugzilla importers). maackk will take a look at the second one.

General development goals as of this moment
What are we trying to optimize for and, e.g., how much is a 1% improvement in site traffic or sign ups worth vs. putting on an extra OH-comes-to-campus vs....?

Primary: improving site usability
Right now, with little data except qualitative, people reliably say the site is hard to use, and fixing that seems more important than adding new components to it. So it's important to clean up the click flows so they are reasonable.

A meta remark here is that we don't do anything smart with looking at where people click and where they seem to get stuck, aka web analytics.

Part of improving this could be the goal of making openhatch.org/search/ be oriented around projects (meaning, communities), rather than oriented around tasks (meaning, bugs in projects), since people don't necessarily already recognize the projects available to browse through at openhatch.org/search/. Relevant bugtracker issue: https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue714

Secondary: improving content
paulproteus said "I have also dreamed in the past of a mailing list training mission, and lizzard (not here at moment) and I dreamed of a bug triage training mission." and "Better training missions make campus.openhatch.org events better!"

Necessary to support the above: Fixing critical backend bugs
Like those in oh-bugimporters. Things that support this goal include having the developer documentation be clearer.