I’d like to discuss the needs of the international community and get a new system in place in the next few weeks. The basic needs are:

• A directory of OpenStack user groups (OSUG) that can host content in different languages: new visitors should be able to find easily an OpenStack User Group for their local area/language. If such group/language is not available, there should be an easy pointer to instructions, tools and policies to create one
• A system for the community  managers to contact the members (all members or just the coordinators/leaders?) of the international communities to coordinate activities.

Requirements

• Register users using SSO: as a user I would like to be able to associate my profile from Launchpad, Linkedin or Google to the site
• Support content in multiple languages (switch list and automatic recognition via browser agent configuration)
• Support roles: managers of the groups can add resources to the directory, members can sign up as members, anonymous can read all content
• Show activity from all groups in my own language on the portal home page
• Directory of OSUGroups, with geographic representation (be able to view the groups on a map and display also the full list of groups on a page)
• Manage content (pages) of generic interest (to host content like how to start a group, general, policies, trademark stuff, generic icons, etc)

Per each user group:

• allow users to add events, each group will expose its ical feed
• show to list additional resources for the group: mailing lists, forums, wiki pages, home page, url of blogs,
• import RSS feed from blogs to aggregate content on groups page
• display photostreams from flickr and such on the home page

Open questions

• is this all we need?
• do we want to host and provide web apps for any of the local groups (mlists, blog, forums, etc)? And if yes, should these be part of the such portal?
• can we reuse code from Ubuntu Loco portal? The code is tightly integrated in Launchpad, local teams need to be created as Launchpad Teams, it uses Launchpad as OpenID provider (bugs included). But it’s already there, it’s fairly simple and it’s a django app
• What other tools can we use for this and do you volunteer to manage such tool?

I’m interested in your opinions: join the OpenStack International Community Team on Launchpad  to discuss this further.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2012. | Permalink | One comment
Post tags: community, growth, international, openstack, user groups