I sat down (virtually over Skype) with Andrew Spittle this evening to talk about putting together a collaboration group for the summer. There are going to be a number of websites launching or relaunching in the fall. Normally, the design and relaunch process would just be internal; the designers working with the paper’s website would propose changes, those changes would be discussed internally, and then they would be implemented.
Both Andrew and I think there will be value, however, in having CoPress facilitate a space for people to collaborate and share ideas on designs. I think we agreed that this might take the form of communal screen-share sessions where each person attending would have between 10 and 15 minutes to present what they’ve worked on and where they still have questions. These sessions will happen every other week or once a month, depending on how actively people are developing against their websites. We didn’t really discuss on the call, but we might also create a space (chatroom, IRC, or the first stage of the Connection Engine) where people can go 24/7 if they have questions, etc.
Thoughts? I think we might discuss this more this weekend or on Monday’s community call. It would be sweet to have this up and running by the end of May.
While those roundtable calls can be useful, would it not be a bit more efficient to focus on a single site each week? Like critiquing a piece of art, each week one person/site could present what they’ve come up with (so far), ask any questions, and then have the rest of the group give feedback and specific suggestions. Such a call could probably take up an hour pretty easily if people have ideas. Otherwise you probably end up rushing through everything. Maybe you do two sites each week, depends on how long it takes.
If you do want to do roundtables, then you want to keep each person’s bit as short as possible, perhaps just presenting a small feature and people can ask a question or two if time permits. Screen shares are just as time consuming as audio chats, as the person must both talk and drive the UI walkthrough. Just my 2 cents.
Good two cents. Andrew and I discussed this on the call and, whereas I’m by no means set on doing an overview of every site on every call, that’s just consensus we agreed upon. Another thought: do the roundtable critiques for two months, and then in the month of August have each organization do a presentation on their near final website with the hope of getting a final review. I’m certainly open to ideas, tho. I think we’ll let this stew for a week, and then write a post for the main blog to see if people are actually interested.
Good point Max and I definitely share your concern that things could get really long really quickly. But, if those involved spent time beforehand looking at the sites then they could come to the table with some ready critiques. This would mean that the person presenting could just maybe focus on one feature like you said because they would know that people had walked through the rest.
Ideally what I was thinking was that the 10 to 15 minutes thing would be the time spent on that person’s site, not necessarily them presenting for that long (sorry if that wasn’t clear). So long as the group was a handful (~6-7) this wouldn’t take too long.