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..