Contents
Proposal
Problem
For people who would like to help organize the social Forum the main way to help is to join a Working Group. That process usually starts with joining a list serve or sitting in on a conference call, which for new people is quite overwhelming and not really conducive to finding a task to start working on as there is usually way too much going on to get a sense of how one could fit in.
Solution
A Projects based approach, that narrows the scope to specific sets of related tasks that is much easier for a person to both understand what the goals are and find specific tasks that they can start working on immediately.
Definition
All Projects would have certain required characteristics. It would have one or more sponsoring Working Groups. It would have a contact person who would be willing to publish a piece of contact info, ideally an email address but this could be a phone number. And it would have a status, either Active, Future, or Completed. Projects would also have a web page, which would at the very least include a description, the contact person's contact info, and list the sponsoring Working Groups. Project types may vary. Some maybe absolutely integral to the success of a particular Working Group and may have lots of oversight and be required to work within that Working Group's defined work flow processes. Other projects maybe much more autonomous and the scope, process, and management style be completely up to its members.
How It Should Work
As with most ambitious undertakings, this should be a multi-phased approach. Please note: some aspects of Phase 2 might be able to be implemented quickly, meaning that some parts of Phase 1: might not need to happen.
Phase 1
We create a link on the navigation box on http://wiki.ussf2010.org. The link will say "Projects" and be immediately under Working Groups. This page will link to a wiki page that is a table of our current projects. It should start with a bare minimum of "Online Consulta Feedback Process", "Online Registration", "Online Proposal Submissions," "Social Networking Tools" and probably multiple other projects that are already in motion. Ideally the list in its first incarnation should include projects that aren't so tied to technology as this should be a USSF wide process, not just ICT.
Each row in the table will have the project name, the project status, the project website, and the sponsoring Working Groups. The project website will link to a page which may just start out as a wiki page which has the information outlined in the Definition Section above.
Phase 2
We create Project pages as groups on organize.ussf2010.org. The group will have fields for all the required info for a Project and maybe some other fields for things like outside list serves, code repositories, issue tracking systems. It may also have it own calendar of events and other fancy things. Since our implementation plans for organize.ussf2010.org plan for allowing a mailman list for each group, we will be able to provide the Project's with a listserve if they don't have an outside list serve.
Once we make all the Project's have their own group on organize.ussf2010.org, we then create a new View on organize.ussf2010.org that displays all of the Projects, allowing users to filter based on status and sponsoring Working Groups and allowing search of the Project descriptions. We then change the "Projects" link on wiki.ussf2010.org to link to this View.
We then create a workflow for new Project being added. Basically the only requirement would be a sponsoring Working Group, and a contact person.
Phase 3
Once the Project pages and the View are created on organize.ussf2010.org, we then start doing mass outreach, promoting both the View for general outreach, and the Project group pages for more targeted outreach.