New features team
Attention please, attention please!
The content in this page is ooold !
I should not have written so much, now I don't want to spend time keeping it up to date.
Contents |
To the anonymous visitor from space (you!):
The new features team needs some more people to take care of wiki and documentation!
If you want to help, get in contact with Andreas (lemon-head)wikitalk !!
New members:
Tools / Howto
Our Job
In theory, our main job would be to find out what our members need and want, and brainstorming for new ideas and solutions. For doing this, it is not really required to be in the team - but it is of course a cool thing to count yourself as a member of this famous crew! And you can show this way that you are especially interested in planning new features.
Evaluate the existing system
- Identify flaws and shortcomings in the existing system, and user needs that our existing system can not satisfy.
Brainstorming with other volunteers (and BW members)
The following is the brainstorming and planning part, that in practice everyone participates in.
- Collect and brainstorm possible solutions and alternatives, or completely new features.
- Discuss the possibilities we have, their pros and cons, and refine the ideas.
- Think ahead, paint a long-term vision.
- Decide which features should get implemented now or later.
- Cooperate with the design team, rate and compare drafts and prototypes created by the designers. In fact, some members of the new features team are also in the design and dev team.
- Stay in contact with the developers who will (or will not) finally implement the new features.
Manage and sort the ideas
What remains for us is
- keeping an overview of discussions and coordinate them a little bit,
- take care of a consistent documentation.
- knowing the "big picture" of all the new ideas, and try to achieve more consistency in the product.
- usability control and user tests (maybe in cooperation with the Testing Team?)
- participate in the brainstorming more than others do it!
Design functionality
With developers and design team [...]
Members
[ manage members ]
| Coordination | |
|---|---|
| Andreas (lemon-head) wikitalk | php, html, css, javascript, wiki; usability & HCI. A second coordinator would not hurt! Currently deep in the code. |
| Members | |
| Hannu (hkroger) wikitalk | |
| Jonas (coroa) wikitalk | |
| Philipp (philipplange) wikitalk | connection to the Developers team |
| Matthias (globetrotter_tt) wikitalk | the design expert! |
| Anu (narnua) wikitalk | |
| James (cardboard) wikitalk | |
| Maikel (lourenssenm) wikitalk | |
| Navin (Navinkurian2002) wikitalk | said he will be inactive for a longer time |
| Roland (rolandomota) wikitalk | |
| Sven (svennieboy) wikitalk | |
| midsch (midsch) wikitalk | see Testing team |
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Join the team
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Who can participate?
Every BW member is welcome to participate in the public discussions listed under the "New features" tag. (at the moment it's only one thread)
Volunteers with access to the BeVolunteer forum can post there,
BeWelcome general > New featuresIf you feel a special affinity for the discussion of usability and new features, you can apply to join the team, see below.
We do not have any strict requirements for people who want to joining our team. However, there are some skills that can help us do a better job:
- an education or a natural sense for usability issues
- technical skills and experience, to understand what is possible or realistic from a technical point of view, or to create some functional or non-functional prototypes.
- a lot of reallife experience with hospitality exchange or other aspects that we need to consider (legal issues, cultural differences, technical infrastructure in different countries..)
- artistic qualities (visual design..)
- a constructive way of discussion, and the ability to understand other people's views and opinions.
- imagination and creativity!
However: As said, these are not to be seen as restrictions!
All of these attributes can valuable for the work in other teams, too. And actually, many volunteers are busy in more than one team - which can help a lot for the communication between teams. So, no problem if you want to join more of them!
The ideal new features team is a mix of people with various skills and backgrounds!
[edit]How much time do I have to spend on this work?
As much as you can and want to offer... (same as in every team)
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How to Join
Simply write something in the
forum thread for team application!If you have other questions, or your team application remains unnoticed (which will hopefully not happen), you can contact bwm:lemon-head or one of the other team members.
[edit]Get the tools running
At the moment we have different tools that all need their separate login. This is cumbersome, but it won't change that soon.
To get started with new features team, the most important is to get access to the forum and the wiki. The only thing you need to do is create a forum account (ideally with your bw username), and apply for team membership - we will take care of the rest.
You might also want to create a skype account to chat with other volunteers. You can find out how skype works on the skype homepage. We will usually write a message on bw or the forum, to establish contact on skype.
For remaining questions, feel free to contact any of the team members listed above!
[edit]Get an overview of previous discussions
To avoid redundancy and waste of time, it is often helpful to have a look at old discussions, before you publish your own brainstorming. Relevant things to read can be found not only in the new features subforum, but also in some of the other teams' subforums, and in the wiki.
Of course, we cannot entirely switch off redundancy in our discussions - and sometimes it is even necessary to restart a discussion from scratch, if the old threads have become too confusing.
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How to work in our team
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Places for discussion
Most of our work is done in the new features forum, but we also need to watch out for "new features"-related discussion in other forums. For instance, most of the discussion about an improved groups system happens in the subforum of the groups team.
We really need to keep our eyes open, and keep up to date with the discussions - much more than other teams.
In addition to the forum, we can use Skype chat, or private messages in BW or the BeVolunteer forum. Skype has the advantage of being a faster way to communicate. On the other hand, it's often hard to follow old skype discussions.
It is very important that we cooperate with other teams: We need the design and software teams to get stuff implemented, and we can be provided with valuable user feedback by the Support Team.
[edit]In practice - learning by doing
Actually, we don't really need to be too strict with our working routines - often it is the best to just start with whatever is in your mind! A good working routine is one that suits all of us - and the best way to find out is try and error.
[edit]In theory - "Design Cycle"
In any discussion, we first need to understand the status quo and identify the problems, then we can think of what can be added or improved. Part of this analysis is that we listen to our happy bw members.
When planning new functionality, it can help to imagine some stories and scenarios of how we imagine our new idea in action.
Once we know more or less what is needed, we (or the devs or designers, or just anyone) can start creating some functional or non-functional demos or mockups, to get a better imagination of what we are going to build.
Once we have arrived at a decision, we need to communicate with the devs so the final implementation can get started. This is done mainly by those members with access to the Flyspray tool or the dev mailing list.
In addition to that, we can make a summary and documentation in the wiki. Maybe the new Sitemap can be a useful tool to organize this documentation. We can document the status quo, the decisions we made and new concepts we come up with, and the relevant arguments.
When the new features are online, or even before when looking at our prototypes, we need to observe how they prove in practice - and think about changes, if necessary. For this sake it is useful to do some user tests, both with the finished product and with our betas and prototypes.
We can see this as a cycle, sometimes called the DIA-Cycle (Design-Implement-Analyze - didn't find a useful reference, sorry --lemon-head 15:36, 1 September 2007 (CEST)) - as opposed to the waterfall model, where everything is considered more or less a linear process.
Some (hopefully useful) tips can be found in the articles Introducing new features and Prototyping.
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List of Tools
Forum
Wiki Tools
- List of New Features - Member related (?)
- List of New Tools - Volunteer related (?)
- Sitemap - documentation of the BeWelcome site structure. This is a new project, and could help for a better organisation of our work.
Wiki Articles
Communication in General
- BV forum
- Skype
- BW messages
- private emails
Cooperation with other teams
- Design Team
- Software Development Team
- Support Team: can provide us with valuable user feedback!
[edit]Learning from each other
See Volunteers academy !!
There is a lot of stuff you can learn when working for BeWelcome, and you should really make the best of this chance! Some tips for learning css and html can be found in Design Docs. For usability stuff, maybe Introducing new features can be a start.
If you are not happy with what you find, don't hesitate to ask your fellow volunteers! Or write your own tutorials in the wiki.
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Ongoing work
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See also
List of New Features contains many suggestions, but this page needs some work and redesign. Maybe it is better to merge with or split the content on other pages?
Unfortunately, the easy tasks are also the boring ones.. If this can't stop you: Cross-linking of wiki articles and forum discussions is something we should be doing all the time, and it helps to get an overview of the different discussions. (I'm getting a little tired doing this myself, sorry. Would appreciate your help..) --lemon-head 16:49, 27 August 2007 (CEST)
[edit]Geo system
Currently we are discussing the technical details for a new geo system in the developers mailinglist. Geo system means: locations and regions with lat/lon information, and integration of external geo services like geonames and googlemaps.
We can still do something useful and try to imagine some scenarios where members of BeWelcome make use of the geo system - to describe a meeting point, to search members with in a region etc.
We also need a section with human-readable explanations of the main technical terms (geocoder, reverse geocoding, AJAX) and the services we want to use (googlemaps, geonames.org).
Maybe a good place to start would be a new page, let's say Geo system. There we can assemble everything related to this project, and cross-link it with the Geography team pages, discussions in the forum, pages in the Sitemap.
[edit]Forum system
See also Forum Team
[edit]Groups system
See also Groups Team
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Site Navigation
At the moment the navigation menu and the site structure of BeWelcome are kind of confusing and need improvement.
See also
[edit]Friends, Relations, Comments
[edit]Notes / Calendar / PIM features
[edit]CommunityCouch
This is not an urgent feature, but we can already discuss about it.
Forum thread: CommunityCouches
[edit]Creating the Sitemap? (bv-wiki)
No, we don't actually need this..
The sitemap can be used for documentation of existing functionality, and for the definition of new features. There can be articles for pages, page elements, and functional systems such as the groups system, the forum system, the gallery system etc. For these articles we will establish a generic text structure with predefined section titles, and heavy cross-linking.
We should decide if we want to use this as a tool, and how much effort we want to put into it.
See Sitemap.
[edit]Team pages in our wiki (bv-wiki)
That's something we should take care of all the time..
The start page of our team has been redesigned, so we need to decide how practical this is.
Plus, we need to put more links to the ongoing discussions in this chapter. We can also explain who is working on these things.
When this page grows too big, we need to put some material in another page.
[edit]Volunteer Tools in BW
These tools should help volunteers to manage the BeWelcome site.
