GnomepalPublic Space

What is Gnomepal?

• User-centric
• Enable small communities (50, not 5 million)
• Use semantic urls – the user should know where they are
• Last.fm – you listened to a song – which of your friends & which of my friends have listened to that song?
• Needs to be modular
• Easy for non-geek users to build – they shouldn’t have to know what’s running, just know that it works.
• This is a product for people who want to go beyond a blog to a community.
• Need blogging, advertising, profile as basic functionality to start with
• Build slow & smart & clean
• Independent developers could use this as a starting point for their community
• Make things easy. Reveal relationships & connections. Reduce clicks.

Primary Goals for today

• Define 5 objectives to work on
• Break into small groups and sprint work (1hr/2hr)?
• Re-gather and discuss
  • each person should have time to speak on their thoughts. Continue or not to continue? Move to smaller # of objectives or do we have time to continue at this rate?
• Small doable, actionable tasks

Adam (technical lead) comments:

• Need to narrow this down a bit
• Make user content belong to the user, instead of the larger blog
  • While still being able to expose elements of the larger site
• Use Organic Groups as a module

Michael (project lead)

Goals

• User profile
  • tagging
  • Who’s close by?
  • Who’s like me? (Relationships)
  • Message board
  • Comment form (shoutbox/pm)
  • Beef up organic groups (which does some of this stuff)
  • add in contact mechanisms
• drag & drop elements Design for the vertical the community is in, not for the individual user. Customization on individual level can be supplied after. So design for community NICHE. Building a tool that communities can use to focus on the user.

Bram: Organic Groups is a huge project with a lot of maintainers. Dangerous to touch it because it’s so complex. It might help us in the short term, but long-term might be tough to deal with legacy issues.

• Find out which of these goals are already possible using existing modules. Compare with what we want. (‘Gap Analysis’).

Organic Groups

• want to implement rapidly
• long term is it appropriate?
• Don’t disrupt legacy code base
• Each user an organic group (not doable?)
• need an architectural assessment of the capabilities of organic groups
  • map capabilities of OG (or any module) to the capabilities that we need
  • figure out the delta between the capabilities we need & the ones available
  • configurability is not easy
  • Bram is willing to lead a breakout group on this
    • what are the capabilities we want?
    • what’s already out there?
• Dell IdeaStorm.com allows users to vote on the features they want
  • Popular Stories – Dell IdeaStorm
• Hans will set up Drigg
  • Crossover w/ Casetracker

What features do we want?

• URL path
  • id/username/whatever
• Blogs Content
  • id/username/content
• User profiles
  • includes activity streams
    • this is built
  • chat
  • if they’re selling their own products
  • affialiate stuff
  • id/username/
  • currently using Bio
    • UserNode is a possible alternative; turns users into nodes
• Advertising
  • General purpose ad network serving in rotation
  • Extend to API
• Media Gallery (audio/video/photo)
  • sucking & spitting media
• Ratings in general (all content)
• Q&A
• Groups
• Points

Who wants to do what

• Bram – IA
• Angel – Advertising high level
• Eric – superuser/testing
• Scott – inner workings
• Andy – theming (un-Drupal-fying)
• Michael – help w/ prioritization & features, user needs; wants clarity around user experience
  • Chris: help us figure out what people expect in a community. We need a roadmap.
• Stuart – can help out with user experience stuff

Scott: there’s a hard way to do things in Drupal, but they’ll save us headaches down the road. Chris: let’s stay away from hacks

Advertising

• Restrict to systems with an API
  • Because it’s easier
  • Amazon
  • AdSense
  • Kontera
• Community owner will decide where ads run
  • User splits may depend on
    • # points, # blog posts, age, etc.
• Blocks can be defined as hidden or shown
• Template determines positioning
• Splits are determined by the ComManager
• Affiliate links are pre-populated w/ account owner’s preferred links
• If the ComManager doesn’t define an affiliate account, $ can go back to foundation
• Give the option to donate X% of ad traffic to foundation
• Define different percentages of revenue by role (& individual?)
• Want to know which of my users is making me the most money?
  • Could know by traffic stats?
  • Or maybe track by URL
• No flash ads (this could be a configuration option)
• Theme background color needs to be tied into ad color (at least for AdSense)
• Configuration option: load ads in same window or new browser window

Relative blocks can not be sacrificed (Related posts, Related users, etc.

Can users bring their own widgets in?

• This is sort of built in to Drupal
• Community owner decides who can add custom content
  • Allow certain users permission

Roles: Want to have high granularity of permission settings. Define capabilities & activities, not just whether you can or can’t use a module.