Wrapping Up

Today I spoke with John Tierney about what he wanted for our final wrap-up. I wrote out our process during the quarter, what our objectives were, what our methods were, and what still needs to be done in the future. Sometime next week we should be meeting again over Skype so we can tie up any loose ends in handing over the content for the next group.

Habla Espanol

Today I finished up transcribing the testimonials from the CDC site, then set to work inputting all the tildes and accents into the quotes. After that I decided to take a crack at translating them into English, and between Google Translate and my own decent Spanish skills, I was able to translate all the quotes fairly decently.

The Google Doc of the site outline.

Finally Scratched the Surface

After mining the XO World Map for days looking for leads to new content, I got a flurry of replies today that show a lot of promise. For one, a Spanish-language site with testimonials from teachers, students and community members in an El Salvador distribution. I also got leads to several other local sites and blogs for various distributions.

As for the testimonials I've already found, unfortunately they aren't plain text but images on the page. So to get the copy onto the site's outline, I've begun to transcribe all the testimonials one by one onto the outline Google Doc. Took a good hour and a half to get through the teachers and the community members, tomorrow I'll knock out the students' quotes too. While it's good to have the Spanish-language versions intact, I also want to ask a Spanish-speaking friend of mine if she wouldn't mind translating the quotes into proper English.

Canvassing Central America

I sent out the call for content email to all the distro's in Central America on the OLPC World Map. I'm slightly concerned that there may not be anyone with access to some of these addresses who can read English, but I suppose if they reply in Spanish I could always wing it with an online translator.

Moving to Dropbox

After our IRC checkpoint meeting we decided to move all our content from Google Docs to a shared Dropbox folder. So today I migrated al the files off our Call for Content folder and onto the Dropbox- which was made so much easier by the fact that Google added in a handy function to zip all contents of a folder and download it at once. Took way less time than I thought it would.

I also shot back a reply to a new reply to my XO Map cold calls. She offered some photos from a distro in Vietnam, so that should be some decent new content to add to the site.

IRC Checkpoint Meeting

Tonight we held a meeting over IRC to discuss where we were in regards to our goals set out at the beginning of the quarter. We decided the RIT team should focus on content aggregation for the time being. I'm going to be redoubling my efforts in hitting the bricks looking for content from community members, with a particular emphasis on tracking down case studies and testimonials, and other sources of copy to fill the gaps in the current content framework.

The full transcript will go up as soon it's made available.

Finishing Up the Microsite

Today I worked on getting the microsite to look as good on the XO's screen as it does on an average PC browser. I had to tweak the font settings, and completely rework the scaling of the menu bar, but the site is now 100% XO-viewable. A good 2-3 hours, well-spent.

Playing With The Microsite

Now that the microsite was up and running, it was time to mess with the design and try to get it looking a bit more Sugary. This pretty much just involved playing with the CSS stylesheet and introducing a better color scheme and some new fonts. I didn't want to go too crazy with new elements, since I want the site to load zippily on an XO screen. I also went ahead and rewrote parts of the menubar so it looks a little cleaner. Plus I added a nice Spanish tagline via the Wordpress admin site. All in all, about 3 or 4 hours of tinkering to get everything the way I liked it.

Here's the link to the finished site.

Figuring Out How to Get At The Damn Site

It took a good hour of talking on IRC with Bernie Innocenti to get the keys and everything else in place so that I could actually access the microsite and start sprucing it up beyond the existing template. Now I'm gonna have to wait till tomorrow to start working on it.

Cold Calling for Content

Today I decided the only way to get the word out to the people on the XO Community Map and get content flowing, was to go to each and every marker on the map and email them myself. So I began sweeping the U.S. listings, from the West to the East Coasts, and after a good 3 hours I was all but finished sending out emails to the U.S. XO distributions. Interestingly, I've already gotten replies from a handful; hopefully these leads will yield some results.

Getting it Organized

Spent a good hour and a half setting up master lists for each of the types of images in the Google Docs folders for our content collection. Each folder now has a spreadsheet with the filename of each image, a caption, the dimensions, and the source. Hopefully adding new files to the lists wil be less of a pain in the ass than working backwards from files already in the Docs.

I also added a few new links to the document in the Docs. We've got a conference call tomorrow morning, and in the meantime I've sent out another call for content to the Sugar mailing lists- this time with a focus on acquiring case studies. Hopefully we'll have more to add to the Docs soon.

The master lists on the Google Docs:
Hardware
Logos
Misc
People
Places
Screenshots

Gathering Content

I've spend a good 2 hours today collecting content from emails from the Sugar Labs mailing lists and adding it to our Call for Content collection on Google Docs. Took a while, but now we have a respectable amount of images to start with.

The images on Google Docs

Catching Up

Today at 12 JT and I met with Prof. Jacobs for about an hour to discuss where we were in the project overall, and we planned some objectives for the next few weeks. The primary goals will be to get a splash page up on the main Sugar site to advertise the changes in the new site, as well as getting the micro-site for the bike race up in time. Secondary to those goals is content collection; we'll be making the rounds on the mailing lists and so forth asking for any and all new content we can incorporate into the redesigned site.

Tomorrow we'll be hosting a Skype call with Christian to discuss how to proceed. In the meantime, we decided to each draw up a mock design for the splash page as well as the micro-site; after the meeting tomorrow we'll combine what works on both sets of designs to get a rough design for the pages.

Third "In The Field" Skype Meeting

Tonight at 6 JT and I discussed the Sugar website with Sameer Verma and his grad student Henry Villar at an XO deployment in Jamaica, as part of our effort to gain more insight on what folks in the field wanted to see from the new site. Sameer brought up some very interesting points- differences in culture affecting impact of the content on the site and even the effectiveness of its layout; the idea of adding first-time computer users as another identity with its own portal, structured in a way that's more friendly to novice net surfers; and burning our tutorial videos to DVD for use in areas where computers are scarce but DVD players are plentiful.

The notes from our meeting on Google Docs (link coming soon).

Second "In The Field" Skype Meeting

Today at 3 JT and I chatted with Kevin Brooks and Chris Lindgren from the Sugar deployment in Fargo, ND to discuss more of what people on the deployment side of Sugar want to see included in the new Sugar Labs site. Many of their concerns echoed similar sentiments from last night's call, and since many of those had already been addressed in our proposed site design, I feel we hit a lot of the marks in our current concept of the new site.

The notes from our meeting on Google Docs (link coming soon).

First "In The Field" Skype Meeting

Tonight at 8 JT and I chatted via Skype with Dr. Gerald Ardito, who has worked with Sugar on deployments and gave us some unique insight into the needs and wants of teachers and others in the field, where the new website will see the most traffic. Interestingly, many of the complaints leveled against the old site were some of the same weaknesses we had recognized ourselves when coming up with the new design, and Dr. Ardito responded favorably when we pitched some of our solutions to these issues. Of course, we also learned a lot about the teacher's perspective towards the site as well.

The notes from our meeting on Google Docs (link coming soon).

Skype Conference with John

JT was sick, so John and I held our own update chat at 10:30 this morning to discuss what we took away from the NYC meeting, as well as our plans moving forward. We arranged days and times for three Skype conferences with various groups "in the field" on deployments, so as to better understand their perspective and their expectations for the new site going forward.

The notes from our meeting on Google Docs.

Face-to-Face in NYC

JT and I went down to Brooklyn to meet with Christian Marc Schmidt at the Green Desk Conservancy, to hammer out the details of the Sugar Labs site redesign. From about 10 am to 5 pm, we discussed every detail of the new site, starting from the basic structure and working our way down to each individual page layout. I have to say, using Christian's Engagement-Context-Reference pyramid as a guide made it a lot easier to design the sitemap (everybody's got a pyramid....). Once we had a design idea of the site's new layout, we Skype'd with John Tierney's group and discussed some of our new ideas. Now that we've got a good idea of what we're trying to accomplish this quarter, that should make it easier to establish a workflow.

The folder containing all our notes on Google Docs.

Conference Call

Today JT and I had a conference call via Skype with John Tierney. We spoke for about an hour about establishing a forum section of the site, as well as where we wanted to take the site, what other ideas we had, and possible future projects. We agreed to hold another brainstorming Skype session on Monday, where JT and I will present our findings on what options are out there for creating a forum. After that, we can hopefully get involved in user feedback from teachers on the content and layout of the forums, before we build the final product.
....And then I made this blog, so we can more easily keep track of our progress.

The minutes of our Skype conversation on Google Docs.

Brainstorming the Front Page

Today Prof. Jacobs, Remy, JT and I spent about an hour in the FOSS Box coming up with ideas for how we want the front page of the sugar labs site to look. We broke the content down, and then JT and I spent another 2 hours or so whipping up a design sketch along with relevant content on the existing site we want to use/link to. We then up'ed the design to Google Docs for review from John Tierney.

The sketch on Google Docs..