Reaching out to the Community

[Rohan Verma <he...@rohanverma.net>]

Hello Everyone,

First of all, I want to introduce myself to the community. I am Rohan Verma
and I am participating in Google Summer of Code 2016 with Apache Allura
this summer. You can read my project proposal here: goo.gl/mXtn1k

I was discussing with Dave regarding reaching out to the community to get
feedback and ideas a few days ago. He suggested that I should put this in
the dev mailing list to get more responses.

Well, from what I have seen, the majority of Allura's users are from
Sourceforge along with some who are using Allura for maintaining their
academic/personal projects. What I need your help with is with ideas about
how we could get in touch with users and potential users of Allura to know
about what they might need improved in the Discussions Tool (as well as
other improvements). Also, I will be mocking up the UI/UX changes before
the actual coding period begins so also wanted to know if there would be
some way we could get review directly from the community before coding it
so that it can be changed to be more user friendly.

Sincerely
Rohan Verma
hello@rohanverma.net

Re: Reaching out to the Community

[Dave Brondsema <da...@brondsema.net>]

On 5/10/16 1:55 PM, Rohan Verma wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
> 
> First of all, I want to introduce myself to the community. I am Rohan Verma
> and I am participating in Google Summer of Code 2016 with Apache Allura
> this summer. You can read my project proposal here: goo.gl/mXtn1k
> 
> I was discussing with Dave regarding reaching out to the community to get
> feedback and ideas a few days ago. He suggested that I should put this in
> the dev mailing list to get more responses.
> 
> Well, from what I have seen, the majority of Allura's users are from
> Sourceforge along with some who are using Allura for maintaining their
> academic/personal projects. What I need your help with is with ideas about
> how we could get in touch with users and potential users of Allura to know
> about what they might need improved in the Discussions Tool (as well as
> other improvements). Also, I will be mocking up the UI/UX changes before
> the actual coding period begins so also wanted to know if there would be
> some way we could get review directly from the community before coding it
> so that it can be changed to be more user friendly.
> 
> Sincerely
> Rohan Verma
> hello@rohanverma.net
> 


There is a users@allura mailing list which might have a few users on it, but I'm
guessing not too many.  We could put a new post on the allura.apache.org
homepage with some way to get people in touch with us better (would have to
figure out how).

For SourceForge users, there is a feature-requests tracker at
https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/feature-requests/ with existing requests.  You
could look through what's already there.  Note that voting is enabled on that,
so some tickets will have many upvotes which is a good indicator.

Mockups seems like the best way forward to me.  Figure out what you think would
be better and then run it by other developers here, and any users you can find.
 Even without actual allura users, you could do a "usability test" face to face
with people you know.  Have allura set up already for them and logged in, then
just explain what you want them to do and see how well they can figure it out
and use it.  That will shed a lot of light on how good it is for new users.  And
I think we can use our own experience to determine what is good for frequent
advanced users.


-- 
Dave Brondsema : dave@brondsema.net
http://www.brondsema.net : personal
http://www.splike.com : programming
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