What is the problem to solve?

Increase momentum of strategic initiatives

Who is this for?

People and organisations that want to support the continued evolution and improvement of Drupal

Result: what will be the outcome?

Better find-ability and visibility of initiatives on drupal.org through clear and compelling initiative landing pages that provide a high-level rationale for the why, what, who, how and where.

How can we know the desired result is achieved?

- Increased activity in the issues that are part of an initiative’s roadmap
- More people offering to sponsor the team behind the initiative

Support from Acquia helps fund testing for Drupal Acquia logo

Comments

yoroy created an issue. See original summary.

yoroy’s picture

A proposed structure for these pages:

1. Why: describe the problem, what is currently missing & describe what the improved situation would look like. Focus on "customer pain".
2. What: Make it concrete with a more specific listing of the outcomes, new features, improvements this initiative introduces. CTA link to the main roadmap/plan issues
3. Who: List the initiative leads, user name + role, link to d.o. profile. Call to action link to the main communications channel (Slack channel, IRC room…)
4. How: ways to contribute: time/expertise and sponsoring. Link to comms channel and roadmap issues again for the former, link to the main contact person’s d.o. profile/contact form for the latter.

Visualised:

simple wireframe with boxes for each of the items outlined above

yoroy’s picture

FileSize
1.9 KB

First draft of actual copy for the out of the box initiative. Did not review this with the team yet!

yoroy’s picture

I updated #2847582: Out of The Box initiative to use the structure proposed here.

webchick’s picture

This is coming up again because now that we have 9 major initiatives + 6 additional "mini" initiatives coming out of DrupalCon Nashville, and about 6 weeks until feature freeze, the question of how to communicate status / who's working on what / what's blocking things / where + how to help / etc. is once again at the forefront.

Gábor and I spent a couple of hours building off of @yoroy's mockups here to create some kind of "initiative portal" of information. Here are those mocks.

Initiative landing page, attempting to combine @yoroy's mocks + some stuff from Topic Pages:

 Fill this out later.

The goal is for these pages to all be a "set once and forget it" (or maybe only remember it once a quarter or something) by linking off to and/or aggregating information from other places vs. someone having to manually do things.

@yoroy pointed out we might want to go with a "stacked, no sidebar" page layout akin to https://www.drupal.org/industries/healthcare here.

Here's a "Home" page, providing an overview:

 Fill this out later.

@yoroy came back with a counter-mockup which could provide some more useful info on here, which I quite like!

 Fill this out later.

And finally, we also did a rough brainstorm of the idea of a more "project management" focused dashboard, since I end up having to compile this information internally for Acquia about once a month, and would vastly prefer for the entire community to know these things. :)

 Fill this out later.

However, @yoroy pointed out that the real audience for this is likely more limited; the core committers and other decision-makers/people who things tend to get blocked on. So we could probably handle this just in a shared Google Spreadsheet or something that we update ~weekly after the cross-initiative meetings.

ANYWAY. Thoughts? :)

Also, linking to a handful of other things I found accidentally while looking for this issue again, LOL.

marcoscano’s picture

Thanks for bringing this back to life! :)

+1000, it will really help discoverability and awareness of what's going on.

One additional thing I personally would expect for these initiative landings is the opportunity to use them as a marketing claim from companies willing to sponsor (or already sponsoring) initiatives. Maybe just having an additional section at the bottom saying something like "Official sponsors" or "This initiative is supported by" and the logos of organizations that specifically contribute funding to the initiative could be enough. IMHO I believe it would be much more appealing to potential sponsor companies something like "hey help to fund this initiative, you'll be featured on these official initiative pages" rather than "we'll be thankful and you'll get d.o credits and karma".

I'm aware this could open the door to some potentially-long discussions or things we would need to sort out, such as:

  • What would be the minimum sponsoring / support level to qualify for being there
    • We could maybe leave to the initiatives to define their own policy and have this policy in a publicly-accessible place? Or maybe have some global standards for all initiatives?
  • How long is the "sponsoring period"
    • Same as above?
  • How the operational aspects of the sponsorship are going to be managed
    • Once we would be offering something in exchange for some amount of money, we are basically selling this space (surprise!), so companies could legitimately expect some level of service quality in the management of this... Would we be leaving to the initiatives to coordinate how this "ad space" is managed (logos appear/disappear on correct dates, etc.)? Who would have access to edit this section, etc.
  • Etc...

I believe, however, that this is something worth investigating. IMHO the benefit of that section could be potentially significant to some of the current initiatives.

alexpott’s picture

For CMI 2.0 we're trying to do something like this with https://www.drupal.org/project/cmi2 - one advantage of making it a project is that it can issue queues which (copying DD&I and the JSDrupal projects) we're using to give meeting credit.

ckrina’s picture

It'd be really useful to have this!

What is the problem to solve? > Increase momentum of strategic initiatives

So I'd prioritize:
- Explain the Initiative.
- Quick status of the Initiative ("what are we doing" section).
- How to get involved ("how can you help" section).

The main problems I see are:
- If it is hard to update or there's too many content they might end up outdated. So maybe the less content that needs to be manually updated the better.
- Maybe not every Initiative need the same blocks. Like the sponsors as @marcoscano was saying, that can be something totally different for the JS Initiative or the Out of The Box. So maybe a "free/custom" content block would makes sense?

And I totally agree with @yoroy with the no-sidebar layout.

webchick’s picture

Cool, spoke about this again today on both the core team + DA tech team call, and on the weekly product manager review call.

@drumm seemed supportive of putting these pages on Drupal.org (which would be good too from a "your logo featured on Drupal.org/something" vs. "your logo featured on someotherwebsite.com/something"), so spun off #2969342: I want a drupal.org development site for initiative landing pages so we can experiment with that. (Anyone who wants to help on implementation, let me know!)

Point duly noted about the sub-optimal sidebar; instead of the current layout at https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives, we'd be looking at the "Capricorn" layout like at https://www.drupal.org/developers. And inlining the "Recent news / Recent activity" blocks side-by-side, most likely between "What are we doing?" and "Who are we?"

webchick’s picture

Also, while the https://www.drupal.org/project/cmi2 has its merits, it also has detriments:

- It creates a second place to look for issues related to the initiative, which can be confusing. (HUGE +1 to crediting for meeting participation, though!)
- The URLs aren't "hackable" so it's hard to find any other initiative that way.
- Project pages lack initiative-focused structured metadata, leading to inconsistency in how they're implemented. (#1300972: Implement initiative content type could really help with this.)

But point definitely taken that whatever mechanism we have for providing org credit on project pages we should do so on initiative pages as well.

hestenet’s picture

As an interim step in the process of improving the initiative landing pages, we've implemented new permissions for Section Maintainers to access the same design system tools that we use when building out landing pages on D.O (like the front page, persona pages, or industry pages).

The Strategic Initiatives page has been converted to the Section content type, which means it can have child pages (or sections) and it's own blog roll.

Right now I've granted @webchick and @Gábor Hojtsy maintainer access to the strategic initiative section: https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives

and I've made a start at documenting the tools here: https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/docs/content/managing-landing-pages

My hope is that we can see how close we can get to the proposed mockups using these tools and then determine what additional features may be needed from there.

webchick’s picture

Ok, I've been playing around with two options (since I didn't have the landing page stuff until the other day):

#1: Utilizing the existing landing page infrastructure. Working example: https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives/documentation (thanks to @grasmash for the content)

Pros:
- Design meshes well with other landing pages (since they're the same, duh :)).
- Really easy to make stylistic improvements; there are presets for lots of different looks+feels. (Centre aligned vs. not; background image, etc.)
- Looks WAY fancier than a boring standard page like https://www.drupal.org/core/community-initiatives or whatever.

Cons:
- Everything is in disparate "CTA" content elements, not as structured fields, so there's no semantic data
- There's no "Clone" functionality (at least that I could find) so it'll be tricky to ensure all of the pages are following the same format.
- Since each landing page is a one-off, making updates to one needs updates in 13 other places. :(

(Am I just missing something here? Is there a way you're keeping e.g. https://www.drupal.org/developers and https://www.drupal.org/marketers and so on in sync that just is escaping me?)

#2: Creating an "initiative" content type (as an Organic group). Working example: https://initiatives-drupal.dev.devdrupal.org/initiative/ootb (user/pass: drupal/drupal, then can log in as bacon/bacon) - Demo @ https://youtu.be/0xIr3GANGks?t=2127

Pros:
- Structured content ensures that all initiatives follow a standard template, and can embed e.g. a list of all issues with the "FOO" tag.
- Possible to open up posting for any "confirmed" users so can be tracking general "community" initiatives; not limited to the 13 or so "strategic" ones (there was a lot of ooohs and ahhhs on the UX call where this was demoed)
- Can tie initiatives to organization credit by filling out a simple field (this is one of the original requests attached to this functionality)
- OG allows for initiative-specific content like "Initiative updates" and "Initiative Events" (if we had Date/Calendar modules which we do not but still)
- OG allows initiative coordinators to make updates to e.g. their member list and meeting schedules and whatnot themselves, vs. bugging 1-2 section admins about it.

Cons:
- It looks ugly as shit, though that's mainly because I haven't figured out how to tie this into Panels/Panelizer yet :)
- More moving parts; for example, ideally we'd have a field collection for contributors (name/role/company?); ideally, we'd selectively pull in commits, etc. This means this way would require a whole review/deployment process, as well as ongoing maintenance, which is not ideal in terms of short-term wins.
- The UX of OG is pretty bad, though the UX of adding Panelizer content is also pretty bad, so this one is kind of a wash.

Anyway. That's where things are currently at.

There was a bunch of feedback from the UX meeting which would be good to incorporate somehow as well:

  • Allow specifying an initiative "type" (maybe a free-tagging field) like UX, coding, theming...
  • Allow specifying a "development progress" indicator (in planning, in design, in development, shipped..)
  • Give initiative leads the ability to change the label of their donate funds button/link (possible with d.o landing pages, but not sure how open we want to make that)
  • Pull sponsor information (e.g. backers from opencollective.com) into page somehow.
Gábor Hojtsy’s picture

Indeed, if there would be a way to combine the shiny with the structured, that would be best. D.o could likely come with page templates that are pre-done with backgrounds, etc. for a landing page, but even better would be to have it apply to structured content. This should be possible with panelizer?

As for whether it should be an OG type or a generic content type, the benefits outlined for OG look weak to me. We don't have dates support and the limited number of people doing initiatives could create content of some other type as well without the overhead of og? Are any initiatives planning to use OG to send contributor group emails or whatnot?

jrockowitz’s picture

This issue inspired me to begin to rework the Webform module's project page based on the some of the above wireframes and using just the styles available from the Blue cheese theme.

My experience and thoughts are that it is going to be very challenging to come up with a one-size fit all 'initiative' content type and maybe a series of stack-able containers similar to the existing landing page infrastructure would be more flexible. There would need to be some clear and required content guidelines. Depending on the state of the initiative, the initiative lead will probably want to promote and demote different things. For example, a new initiative might want to promote a call for help or funding at the top after the required initiative summary.

The MVP initiative page needs to capture the fields required for the index page. It might be an okay assumption that initiative (and project) members would know some basic HTML containers and not require them to extensively use panels.

webchick’s picture

Re: OG, yeah, I think the main reason I ended up going there (I started with just a "boring" content type) is so that there could be more than one "owner" of an initiative page, since we are trying to get away from that concept of an initiative "owner," and transferring node authorship can sometimes be political. However, that is probably taken care of—at least for strategic initiatives—now that https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives is an OG itself. We can just add all initiative folx in MAINTAINERS.txt to the maintainers list there.

webchick’s picture

Ok, also did a major revamp to https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives to include @d8initiative tweets + the D8 core calendar in the sidebar, and follow the proposed wireframe that @yoroy suggested. (Note all the links are dead because I don't want to go around creating the other initiative landing pages until we have one of them solid. "Plan" will eventually be subsumed into those and the overview will include only description + status, like "Documentation" does).

Observations:

- It's really hard to find "images" representative of each of the initiatives. :P Especially at such a small size.
- The statuses being just inline text make it really hard at a glance to tell which initiatives are further along than others.
- A lot of this content hadn't been updated since 2016, and it's so cool to be able to replace "aspirational" mocks with actual screenshots! :D (OTOH, they look a lot less "wow" now, so... :\)

Anyway, thoughts from designer-y people would be great! :)

jrockowitz’s picture

@webchick Maybe the images should be linked to their respective initiative on https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives page.

You can also suppress the table border using <table class="views-view-grid"> but then I think you will need HRs using <tr><td colspan="2"><hr/></td></tr> between each initiative row.

Gábor Hojtsy’s picture

Yay great updates to https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives :) I always thought its VERY hard to convey status anyway without relying on 10 indicators or whatnot. Like the media initiative has a stable module in core (is that done?) but it has the media library that is simultaneously in design and very far ahead in implementation. So where is that initiative? It is certainly not in planning. Although in terms of some critical user functionality it is :) Maybe we can break down each initative to 2-3 pieces and have stats of each. Like Media would be:

Media data storage: Stable/Done.
Media Library and reuse: In implementation
WYSIWYG integration: In planning

That provides a lot of detail at a glance, yet lets us to be honest about things.

webchick’s picture

That's a great idea! I'll work on that for my next pass.

webchick’s picture

Feedback from today's UX meeting where we we reviewed https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives and https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives/documentation:

- Structured content for initiatives would still be super valuable, not only for consistency across the pages, but also to kinda "force" thinking about having things like meetings, issue tags, etc. Unclear if we can do some kind of "middle ground" here, where we use the standard layout tools on a content type that gets auto-populated from field values, and give people permission to create/manage their own initiatives.

- In terms of dynamic page bits, it would be really wonderful to have a View that allowed you to specify an issue tag and pull in issues with that tag. Similar to the dashboard block showing "your issues." I think this is something that'd need to be developed and explicitly exposed to Panelizer, tho.
- Also "would be nice": a two-column layout vs. choosing between a full-width or 3-column, which are the only things I can find atm. Must read the docs again, I think I'm missing something.

- Add icons to the Twitter / Slack buttons so they are more obvious. Also consider offering a "Share this on Twitter" kind of deal like on the Webform project page: https://www.drupal.org/project/webform

- Allow not just a single screenshot, but a video/carousel to show different pages/phases. It's hard to grok from a single screenshot what the "Workflow" initiative's about, for example.

- People involved should be photos, plus a blank one of "This could be you! Join here!"

Hopefully I didn't miss anything! Next I'm hoping to churn out a few of these pages, which will probably expose more things.

webchick’s picture

I got lightly chastised at Frontend United for having a bunch of dead links at https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives so I went through and created a few more "skeleton" pages (up thru Documentation), and one more fleshed-out one: https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives/admin-ui-js. I also expanded the list of initiatives to include completed ones.

In so doing, however, I noticed kind of a "critical bug" about this approach. Which is that even if I appoint an initiative coordinator (in this case @ckrina) with the highest level of OG permissions ("maintainer"), she can't actually use the inline editing tools to edit any page content. (To update the image at https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives/admin-ui-js, she had to Slack it to me, I had to edit the node and upload it, then edit the CTA to include it.) This means that the only people who could edit anything under this section would be people who are not only initiative coordinators but also have supercow permissions on Drupal.org which would be basically, like, Gábor and myself. :P That's not ideal.
Ideally, the initiative coordinators could edit these pages themselves and keep them up to date without pinging anyone when, say, a meeting schedule changes, or a new roadmap item or initiative coordinator gets added, or what have you.

Am I just missing something basic here?

hestenet’s picture

Hm... so it looks like the In-Place-Editor is only working for users with extra elevated privileges, however, the standard Panels/Panelizer interface seems to be working for my test account which only has the 'confirmed' role and maintainer permissions. Should be accessible via this 'customize display' link:

Customize display

Could you have @ckrina give that a try to start?

webchick’s picture

Hahaha, whoops! File this under "@webchick should learn how to use Panels before asking stupid questions." :D Thanks!

gusaus’s picture

Couple, hopefully, not too random questions -

* Is the work being done here going to serve as the basis for completing https://www.drupal.org/project/drupalorg/issues/1300972?
* How does the OpenCollective integration overlap with what's being discussed in https://www.drupal.org/project/drupalorg/issues/2138397#comment-12435111?
* Should a reworked version of https://www.drupal.org/community-initiatives be an entry point for those interested in getting involved? If so, https://www.drupal.org/project/content/issues/1414988 is probably another related issue.

hestenet’s picture

@gusaus

  • The work here is serving as a start to understand what the initiative landing pages really need in terms of content and tools, by using existing custom landing page tools. Once they've been used 'in the wild' so to speak, we can use that to inform what might need to be part of a full content type.
  • Open collective integration is still a work in progress, in terms of setting up the account and relationships with OpenCollective so we can set up some first trial integrations. Hopefully @rachel_norfolk will be coordinating the first trials with some test projects when that is ready. We've been primarily thinking of it as something that integrates with projects, but it would certainly make sense to integrate with initiatives as well.
  • I think reworking the community-initiatives landing page could potentially go hand in hand with the issue content type, once this experiment with the core strategic initiatives has proved out the format and the needs.
gusaus’s picture

Appreciate the clarity @hestenet

I can follow up on the related issues... now that I know they're related (:

With regards to OpenCollective integration, some of the work done by @btopro might be of value -

https://github.com/opencollective/opencollective-api/issues/769#issuecom...
https://github.com/opencollective/opencollective-api/issues/793
https://www.drupal.org/project/hax
https://www.drupal.org/project/webcomponents

As @rachel_norfolk is aware, there are already a couple projects/community initiatives already set up on OpenCollective ready to make the switch to DA as host.

Thanks!

ckrina’s picture

Just confirming that I can use the standard Panels/Panelizer interface for https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives/admin-ui-js :)

nod_’s picture

nod_’s picture

Status: Needs review » Fixed

let's be bold and remove from the todo list :)

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.