TheFridge

TheFridge

Status

Introduction

This specification will cover the idea of "The Fridge", a community run website for Ubuntu that every Ubuntu user will want to set as their default homepage.

http://perkypants.org/misc/the-fridge.jpg

Rationale

"The Fridge" is an amalgamation of website ideas from around the web, designed to centralize news and information found throughout the Ubuntu community. We maintain evolving content in far too many places at the moment, so it is very difficult for users to find cool stuff, or have a single place to go.

The best way to describe it is a combination of news site, spreadfirefox.com (grassroots marketing), gnomejournal (original content), developer interviews, picture gallery, and general "portal" (ugh) for the Ubuntu community. The endstate should be that every Ubuntu user wants to set The Fridge as their default homepage. Our target audience is existing Ubuntu users.

The Fridge can cover many areas of the community, so we need to avoid the dreaded "instead of doing one thing well, we do everything poorly" It should be a healthy mix of content that doesn't overdo an area that it covers.

Possible Coverage Ideas

  • News - We should concentrate on Ubuntu-specific major news only. Linking to every Ubuntu review on the internet only replicates existing news sites. We should instead focus on things that existing users can immediately benefit from.
    • Developer News - Ubuntu-Traffic already covers developer related news well. The Fridge could supplement that with "buzz generating" news about Ubuntu. For example something like "With the Breezy release a month away, we thought we'd take you through a tour of the new Slick N Run tool." Users read about new features, tell friends, generate excitement. "Whoa, did you see The Fridge today? That X.org stuff is awesome!"
  • Original Content - We need good quality content to suck the user in. A typical news site is "Evolution 2.2 released". Big deal. The Fridge Way would be "Getting Started with Evolution 2.2" with screenshots and a walk through of the major features in a non-intimidating format. Keeping a high quality level of content is insanely difficult, but is the defining characteristic that makes The Fridge more than a portal.

    • Integration with the wiki (Need to talk to jsgotango about this) - There is already a large amount of quality content in the existing wiki. We should identify the really good ones, and have a "scrub list". Fridge contributors would then team up with the docteam/wiki people and polish them up with nice screenshots, etc. Then, for content stories we can write a short introduction to the topic, and merely link to the document in the wiki. A good example is the SynapticHowTo. There are tons of pages in the wiki that are like this, about 80% there. It would take two people a few hours to make that page Fridge-worthy at most. Getting content this way has some great advantages:

      • The Fridge gets high quality content, and the wiki pages get the love they need. Both sites gain. As groups go around doing wiki clean ups, the fridge can follow along.
      • People who have taken the time to contribute to the wiki can have their work published on the "Ubuntu news site" and get proper recognition.
      • It's easier for us to gang up on wiki pages as a group. So for example, let's say the fridge wants to run 3 content-type stories a week. In #ubuntu-fridge the /topic would be "Work this week is on these three stories". The Fridge TODO would have a list of these kind of pages. People who want to contribute but don't have alot of time to give can pop in and out and help out where they can without having to commit to anything. (OT: It'd be cool if you could vote on how useful a wiki page is so we have an idea of where the real good pages are.)
      • I'm assuming the Fridge will look like the rest of the Ubuntu sites, so while we have a CMS like drupal serving out the "front page", when they click on the "read more" or whatever they're taken to the wiki page, but since they look the same it's all seamless. The same idea can be applied to the forum links.
      • Wiki documents are time insensitive - We'll have lots of things running on the fridge, but we can start identifying these stories now. We can have a nice queue of stories so that when it's a slow news day we have things ready to publish.
    • Developer Interviews - These are really great because they're easy to do. Using VoIP any given developer can talk about what they're working on for 30 minutes instead of taking a half day to answer with a detailed email. They can then get back to work and Fridge volunteers can do the work of transcribing. This would be entirely dependent on developer workload, we wouldn't want to be conducting these interviews during the last phase of a cycle. Developer-type stuff also brings in more technical readers and tends to get linked by major news sites:
      • Example: James Henstridge's few blog posts about source control systems got linked from a fair amount of major sites. Now, imagine an interview with Robert and Martin, discussing bazaar and bazaar-ng, with James mediating the discussion.
      • This would also be a great way to publicize areas that need volunteers (ie. Matthew Garrett talks Laptop Support), explain some of the new functionality (ie. Michael Vogt talks about Synaptic), and dive into real hard core developer/MOTU topics (ie. Source Package Management with Scott James Remnant)
  • Marketing Ideas - spreadfirefox (sfx) has had huge success in wrangling in their users for grassroots marketing. Here's some of their ideas:
    • A download counter - a "metric" of sorts that show how popular the product is. This is available as a web service that users can put on their blog. Whenever there is a milestone in their counter, the entire community is reenergized, and is widely publicized on media around the web.
    • User galleries - sfx has an area where users can upload pictures of their Firefox related events. This visualizes the community for people around the world. For example, pictures of release parties, pictures of "Ubuntu Circle of Friends" at every major monument around the world, pictures of large lab deployments, "My mom using Ubuntu!" etc.

    • Ubuntu Coins - Too Cool. What better way to recognize hard working volunteers than with the truly unique Ubuntu Coin!

    • Mozilla Mosaic Project. Users from around the world mail in postcards and local press clippings which are then placed on a wall at their HQ. After a while it looks really cool.

    • 10x10 marketing. 10x10 is "10% of desktops running GNOME by 2010." Ubuntu can help because by default we send users 10 CDs. We should encourage people who get the free CDs to "get 10 people involved".

    • Edubuntu is one of the big goals for Breezy. With the LTSP work going on this will rock. We should market this. Get LoCo's involved with their local educational institutions. Volunteers can donate time and/or hardware to local schools with events. We can then market this on the fridge. "Fooville's LoCo team helped a local middle school deploy linux workstations, here's how they did it." We should also feature large educational Ubuntu deployments, complete with pictures of real users using Ubuntu.

    • Volunteer/Developer of the Month? Too much? How about Developer of the Cycle. "The hero" of that given development cycle.
    • Volunteer coordination - How to get involved, etc.

  • LoCo Coordination and exposure - Give the LoCo's a place where news and pictures can be posted. "LoCo-Foo team is holding an installfest in two weeks in FooVille."

  • Calendar of Events - A centralized location of community related events. This should be something that users can subscribe to via Evolution (ie. webcal). Meeting reminders would be great, or perhaps a box on the side that says something like "The next Ubuntu meeting is at 1900UTC in #ubuntu-meeting" and then a link to the announcement/agenda.
  • Inter-team Communication - Allow for contributors to see what other teams are doing easily without having to dig too far. "Launchpad status update for this month" and "The MOTU Report"
  • User comments - Although we want to encourage user participation (especially contribution), it would be much better for discussion about Fridge items to take place on our forums. Not only does this reduce the amount of clutter and irrelevant stuff on the site itself, it directs users towards the forums, which are a rich source of information and interaction with other Ubuntu users.

Things that will lead to utter failure

The Fridge is being built, so it's still fragile:

  • "Slashdot for Ubuntu" - We should focus on signal instead of noise. Let's not waste time figuring out how to manage and regulate noise, instead concentrate on producing such a strong "content signal" to drown out the junk.
  • Overcommitting - We try to cover so many things that we end up being mediocre. The mantra should be regular updates without burn out.
  • Developer and Community buy in - We need volunteers, we need high quality work. How do we manage this?
  • Bad Information - We don't want "Now that you've added marillat's sources and debian experimental, alien this RPM ... " We should be pushing the proper solution in our content.

  • It's Been Done Before - in everything we do, we should aim to be new and different - TheFridge should be a news site like no other.

Implementation Plan

  • Aggregate all ideas and start with a rough working model of the site (perhaps under JeffWaugh, JamesTroup will happily use rewrites so it's not actually running as JeffWaugh).

  • Start building time-irrelevant content (ie the in depth stuff).
  • Target people in the community that we know are news bots and love to write about Ubuntu.
  • Ensure we can cover what we think we can cover so we don't overcommit.

  • Aim for a celebratory release with BreezyBadger, or perhaps a 7/14/21 day countdown, documenting one great feature each day.

User Interface Requirements

  • The site needs to be a reflection of the Ubuntu Community. It can't be too busy and overwhelm the user, but it must provide enough information to be compelling.
  • It needs to be obvious that it's not just another news site. It's The Fridge, its quirky ...

Outstanding Issues

  • Community Fragmentation - Currently there are multiple places where users can get their Ubuntu "fix". The mailing lists, irc, the forums, planet, and blogs from around the Internet. Some BOF attendees were concerned that TheFridge may duplicate effort and further fragment Ubuntu information, but we hope to do the opposite.

  • Need to choose a platform to host the content on. We've discussed Mambo and Drupal, both PHP based, which JamesTroup has roughly agreed to (we should get security audit if possible).

  • Some BOF attendees have raised concerns with the name. A couple of other suggestions have come up, such as 'watercooler'. Whatever we choose, it should be wacky, intriguing and quirky. We don't want to be just another news site.

UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/TheFridge (last edited 2008-08-06 16:36:01 by localhost)