We are building an increasingly dynamic hub of information, a living record of activity, and a beacon for international, public sector open-source collaboration, which will grow as a gateway to a rich and varied ecosystem of ideas, resources, and communities.
These are examples of representational user stories based on discussions and feedback we’ve received. We believe these are the main goals of people who come to our website.
As an employee of a public organization curious about membership I want to explain the benefits of public code and membership to colleagues So that I can persuade them that our organization should join
As an employee of a related non-governmental organization I want to see high quality, meaningful work So that I can rely on the Foundation for Public Code in my own work
Establish our position as thought leaders with open source activists, government technology and digital transformation experts, other domain space influencers, political decision makers and philanthropists.
Grow traffic to key sections: Membership, Codebases, Stewardship, Background (and other fundamental explanations), Events and Communications calendar, Join us, and Standard for Public Code (and related marketing pages)
Increase site utilization: lower bounce rate, while increasing page depth and visit duration — overall, and specifically for intra-site page visits.
To increase membership inquiries, we will showcase engagement by other (potential) members to lend us credibility, testimonials from member orgs/codebases, and success stories about codebases under stewardship.
To support reuse of codebases under stewardship by new public organizations, we will make it easy to find basic info about codebases, their functionality, their community, their maturity level and potential.
To increase visibility of the Standard, we will show where and how it’s in use, highlighting successes, and invite community building around it.
To enable our community to make the case for public code, we will provide a layman’s explanation, backed by targeted evidence to help non-technology experts understand its advantages and disadvantages (for example, business cases for financial decision makers)
To demonstrate our position as thought leaders, we will showcase our broader open source community engagement and participation by showing who we share stages with, which publications/platforms we have access to, our high value press mentions, and references to us in official documents.
To grow traffic from the homepage, we’ll feature engaging content with clear calls to action and straightforward user journeys.
To increase site utilization, we will tailor content and architecture to better accommodate our various audiences, and use lightweight web analytics to see in detail where we are losing people, and what areas may benefit from more obvious navigability.
To become a beacon for open and transparent processes, we will build upon the existing site’s idea of a seamless fusion between communication and tools and publicly demonstrate the value of this way of working.
Open and public - Aim for 100% open-source and public domain languages and tools. Temporarily fall back on closed tools only when there is consensus on the benefits.
Simpler and fewer - Use common, established tech whenever possible. For example, CSS > SCSS, avoid Javascript.
Easy expansion - Beautiful design should not interfere with or overly complexify the process of adding and editing content. Templatization and continued automatic ingestion of markdown is essential.
Unified content, flexible display - Few sources of info serving multiple endpoints. Continue to use Jekyll, Liquid and CSS to enable one content set to serve web, multi-device, and print/PDF.
Rich content - Enable embedded video, social and GitHub hooks
Presentation modes - Information should be accessible via desktop and mobile web browser, social media, email, and pdf (digital or print)
Human accessible - WCAG 2.1 Level A (minimum). Accommodate the vision-impaired with screen-reader friendly, high contrast design. Avoid absolute text size units. Ensure proper keyboard-based navigability.
Linguistically accessible - Speak to an international audience by using standard, non-colloquial English. Speak to a non-technical audience by avoiding jargon, or defining it when necessary and helpful.
Technically accessible - Tools, languages and implementation style should prioritize procedures and code that is relatively easy to grasp and collaborate on.
Visible process - Bring tools and communication closer. Select for technologies which broadly facilitate viewing, insight, understanding, sharing and participation.
Dogfood - Contribute to open source tools, practices and culture by avoiding closed/commercial platforms (even if they are arguably more powerful).
Invite and reward feedback - Create and bond with collaborators by responding to their ideas, incorporating the good ones, and visibly crediting them.
Document well - As the new site is built out of the old, align on agreed-upon best practices, and document these patterns as part of the process. Enable future collaborators (and forgetful selves) to understand past decisions.
Modular: Design with flexibility in mind, facilitating closer parity between organizational needs and website structure
Transparent and Traversable: Keep communication connected to the work by using tools that blend them (like GitHub) and heavily using links to enable fluid traversal of the ecosystem
Central and Extensible: While the site will be an increasingly capable hub of information, activity, and identity, it will perform best not as a self-contained, all-inclusive structure, but as a gateway to a rich and varied ecosystem of ideas, resources, and communities. It should be designed to share roles and responsibilities with other tools and efforts (like outreach, meetings, social media)
Informationally and functionally-focused. Flashy marketing moments have their place, but should be used minimally, and generally take a backseat to the real work of organization, collaboration and information.
Machine and system-savvy, focused on people impacted by the work
Not: Computery as superficial visual motif
Text-focused (but not ‘brutalist’ or abstracted)
Future-looking (but not futuristic) and a bit timeless
Synthesis of digital (process), architectural (physical civic infrastructure), and organic (humanity), to reflect the work’s central medium in its physical and human contexts
Pops of color and purposeful photography to help bring it to life
Imprintable. A neutral/monochromatic design foundation enables others to see themselves, their orgs and communities in our work. Heavy branding can interfere with this.
Not: Generic, white-labelable
Intimacy at scale. Bridge the gap between human scale and civic/global implications.
Key elements can feature simple interactivity and animation, to bring the site subtly to life
A simple symbol/color design language could be developed to assist in wayfinding, which also acts as a sort of functional branding
We are starting to explore an updated site structure, based on the PRD's parameters. This will be assembled and discussed in wireframe form, filled out and updated over the next weeks, after which we will iteratively roll out updates to the site. Novel elements and functionality will be designed and rolled out at the same time.
Product Requirements Document community call 18 February 2021
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