David:
While I would be happy to see the subcommittee (once formally
established) explore changes to the home-page format, our goal is to
increase -- not decrease-- the number of people contributing to the
focus area.
The OASIS focus areas are designed to be "community-driven Web sites."
Kris
Kristen James Eberlein
David J. B. Hollis wrote:
2F1D35AA-3955-47CA-A682-CF4CC06718DF@AandOConsultancy.ltd.uk"
type="cite">I'd like to propose the following changes to the
dita.xml.org site:
1. That the home page has more permanent content which provides a very
brief introduction to DITA, and an introduction to the site, with
hyperlinks to key areas. This should be written with search engines in
mind, as much as site visitors. If agreed, we need to discuss what this
content should be. A review of search engine metadata can go alongside
this.
2. That the style sheet is changed such that more content can be fitted
onto a page. Something more like the coverpages site:
http://xml.coverpages.org . This may, of course, just be a Mac thing.
But, then again, there should be as few 'browser penalties' as
possible. The same style sheet is used across the whole xml.org domain,
so this could impact quite a few sites. However, it surely should be
possible to have a modified style sheet for the dita.xml.org site?
3. That permissions are changed such that contributors to the site
should be paid up OASIS members. See below.
4. That someone with a knowledge of Drupal investigates whether it's
possible for calendar events to be automatically removed when they're
over. This would reduce quite a bit of site administration.
dita.xml.org Site Contributors
Currently anyone who registers with dita.xml.org can contribute to the
site. There is no checking, nor is there a fee for being able to
contribute to the site. At least, the only checking is a valid email
address, but this only needs to be valid whilst registering.
This policy of anyone being able to contribute may seem to follow the
spirit of an open source community, but has lead to a certain amount of
abuse. This in turn makes work for those administering the site. As
interest in DITA grows, so will dita.xml.org site traffic, and with it
the amount of abuse.
'Dita' is also the first name of the artist Dita von Teese. It is quite
possible that some of her fans visit the dita.xml.org site. Especially
as dita.xml.org goes up the search engine rankings. There is currently
nothing stopping them from contributing to dita.xml.org, whether from
ignorance or malice.
When someone visits the site, they should only see quality
contributions from people who 'have something to say'. There should be
a cachet to contributing to the site.
Setting the bar such that only OASIS members can contribute would put
the dita.xml.org site on an equivalent level to joining an OASIS TC. I
do not think this is expecting too much, and surely it's what visitors
to the site would expect?
Note that there are also OASIS mailing lists, and these can be where
non OASIS members can make contributions or ask questions. List
moderation is easier than site administration.
Implementing this would require some sort of tie up between the main
OASIS site and the xml site. An extension to the TC joining procedure,
for instance. It should at least be necessary to log-in to an OASIS
Account before registering as a dita.xml.org site contributor. This
would need to be secured such that anyone with a knowledge of Drupal
couldn't abuse the registration process.
Depending upon reaction to raising the bar, it may be possible to
introduce an 'entry level' OASIS membership. This would offer the
ability to contribute to such sites, but not participation on a TC.
This is obviously for OASIS to decide, but the point is that site
contributors should only be 'paid up' OASIS members. I don't think this
would be necessary, I'm just raising it as a option. Being able to
contribute to xml.org sites would become a benefit of OASIS membership.
Carol/Mary:
Would you please forward to OASIS Management and your techie folk for
their comment.
Would it be possible to generate a list of current dita.xml.org
contributors, and then compare this with the OASIS membership list? It
would also be interesting to correlate this with DITA related TC &
sub-TC membership.
David
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