Unstructured footer menu

Agreed. So rather than:

<ul class="drupal-news"><li class="0 first"><a href="http://drupal.org/news">Drupal News</a></li>
<li class="1"><a href="http://drupal.org/planet" title="News from Drupal community members">Planet Drupal</a></li>
<li class="2"><a href="https://association.drupal.org/news" title="News from association.drupal.org">Association News</a></li>
<li class="3"><a href="http://drupal.org/social-media" title="Drupal on social media">Social Media Directory</a></li>
<li class="4"><a href="http://drupal.org/security" title="Advisories from the security team">Security Announcements</a></li>
<li class="5 last"><a href="http://groups.drupal.org/jobs" title="Jobs posted on groups.drupal.org">Jobs</a></li>
</ul>

So it should be more like:

<h3><a href="http://drupal.org/news">Drupal News</a></h3>
<ul class="drupal-news"><li class="0 first"><a href="http://drupal.org/planet" title="News from Drupal community members">Planet Drupal</a></li>
<li class="1"><a href="https://association.drupal.org/news" title="News from association.drupal.org">Association News</a></li>
<li class="2"><a href="http://drupal.org/social-media" title="Drupal on social media">Social Media Directory</a></li>
<li class="3"><a href="http://drupal.org/security" title="Advisories from the security team">Security Announcements</a></li>
<li class="4 last"><a href="http://groups.drupal.org/jobs" title="Jobs posted on groups.drupal.org">Jobs</a></li>
</ul>

So each of the groups of lists in the footer would have a heading.

Has been confirmed …

Tagging.

H2's would be fine.

What's needed to fix this?

This is actually set in drupalorg_crosssite.module, after the // Build the footer navigation comment.

See http://drupal.org/node/1018084 for dev sites to try out changes.

I put in a request here https://drupal.org/node/2170269

Not sure when I'll get to it, but always good to start the process.

So just to confirm what's there now. In modules/drupalorg_crosssite/drupalorg_crosssite.module in the drupalorg_crosssite_preprocess_page() function the footer is defined as an array:
$vars['page']['footer']

Which is then spit out in the bluecheese theme themes/bluecheese/tpl/page.tpl.php:
<?php print render($page['footer']); ?>

I am a bit unsure though as to where the array is processed... This would need to be broken up though so that we aren't just styling the first element in the list to look like a heading, but that it is actually a proper HTML heading.

   $vars['page']['footer'] = array_merge(array('drupalorg_crosssite' => array(                                                            
      '#weight' => -1,                                                                                                                     
      '#prefix' => '<div class="doormat clearfix">',                                                                                       
      '#suffix' => '</div>',                                                                                                               
      array(                                                                                                                               
        '#attributes' => array(                                                                                                            
          'class' => array('drupal-news'),                                                                                                 
        ),                                                                                                                                 
        '#theme' => 'links',                                                                                                               
        '#links' => array(                                                                                                                 
          array(                                                                                                                           
            'href' => 'http://drupal.org/news',                                                                                            
            'title' => t('Drupal News'),                                                                                                   
          ),                                                                                                                               
          array(                                                                                                                           
            'href' => 'http://drupal.org/planet',                                                                                          
            'title' => t('Planet Drupal'),                                                                                                 
            'attributes' => array('title' => t('News from Drupal community members')),                                                     
          ),  ... 

Thoughts on approaches to break this down?

That is all accurate. The render array doesn't necessarily need to be broken up, but rearranged. The call to render() in page.tpl.php is the processing, that part should stay untouched.

I don't know the best way to format the array to add in headings. Since this is site-specific code, we aren't afraid of being hacky and putting markup in #prefix and #suffix.

I don't know that I got the headings correct. I wasn't sure how these items were organized so made it up.

This is a totally fine way to provide feedback. Great etiquette.

I didn't change the links, simply the headings that are used to organize them.

In the present footers, the headers are actually their own links which roughly are associated with categories of links in the footer.

I could have simply replaced the link and made it a heading, but that didn't seem right either.

It's been about a month & a half since I posted a patch on this.

@Geijutsuka's comments were useful clarifications about the patch, but I think it's still good.

I don't think it's done right now, and these changes should be an improvement.

Looks good, committed & deploying.

Excellent... Thanks @drumm.