[Dfey-nw-discuss] Re: DFEY website redesign

[Tim Dobson]

Tim Dobson wrote:
> Now we have at least one new local group starting up in the South East, 
> an increasing number of interested people and a pretty logo, I think 
> it's the right time to start thinking about developing a prominent web 
> presence

I was thinking of a web presence along the following sort of lines.

DFEY.org would be a backbone organisation providing structure, direction 
and links, perhaps a bit like lug.org.uk in some ways.

Lets start with mailing lists.

Hopefully, lists would be provided by the Savannah project, 
www.nongnu.org - mailman servers are really really hard to run well and 
the guys at Savannah do a great job at making our lives as easy as possible.

We should be able to, on request, set up new mailing lists for new 
localgroups (hopefully dfey-*-discuss format).

I think there should be a dfey-general-discuss for general 
non-geographical discussion and perhaps dfey-admin-discuss for 
non-geographic administration boringness. :)

DFEY.org

The DFEY.org home page would be fairly simplistic, concise and low on 
text content, linking one to several other main pages (again, concise, 
small amounts of text) and a "more" page containing links other content.

On the three main pages, perhaps we would describe DFEY, talk about 
local groups and mention how you can get involved. (The last two seem 
very similar - maybe not those two!)

*.dfey.org or dfey.org/

In my opinion, local groups should have their own web presence. It 
shouldn't be forced, but a local DFEY group in Kent and in Glasgow, as 
much as they might all wish to meet face to face, probably aren't going 
to, and would probably like to design their own region specific DFEY sites.

Wiki's

I don't know about wiki's. Wiki's are great for adding ideas  to, 
collaborating on stuff, planning meeting, discussing stuff...
But you have to work VERY hard to make them work as a homepage as the 
important info gets hidden in links that don't appear too be obvious.
I can see the benefits for having a unified wiki for local groups, but 
at the same time there's a lot to be said for running one's own.

The DFEY-NW wiki needs a cleanup; there is no doubt about that.

Logo's

I imagined dfey.org using the vanilla DFEY logo and local groups using a 
template of the logo with then the region they revolve around underneath 
in text. Take a look at this page to see what I mean.
http://nw.dfey.org/wiki/Press_resources

IRC

I would imagine that the #dfey channel would start to become more 
focused on non-geographic discussion and that #dfey-* would become used 
in general for discussion about geographic stuff.
There have been discussions about different networks, however, for the 
time being, lets stick with freenode and discuss it in detail once we 
have a new website online.


I can imagine various people have differing opinions... if you have a 
lot to say, maybe try and keep one mail/segment so the conversation 
threads nicely.. gah that's me just being OCD ;) don't worry!

Tim