Make a page dedicated to the community rep
Opened this issue · 4 comments
This is somewhat related to #56 but more narrowly-scoped. I'm not sure we actually want the individual members from each company listed on the site as that can change somewhat frequently, and it's also not that relevant to the community. The actual companies may be of more interest. However, what is relevant and should be front and center is the community rep. After reading the comment in scalacenter/advisoryboard#114 I realized that if someone goes to the Scala Center website there is indication of a community rep. I sort of believe this should be easily viewable that there is a rep and who it is. In reality this should maybe even be visible on the Scala lang site itself.
Here's what I'd like to propose:
- A dedicated page this site to explain the purpose of the community rep and who that individual is
- Instructions on how to reach out to this person in the appropriate capacity
- This page linked in the appropriate places
@eed3si9n seeing that you're our sole community rep, how would you feel about this? I see you created https://github.com/eed3si9n/scalacenter-proposal a while back? Maybe this would be a good opportunity to list things like that.
I'd also like to hear from @SethTisue, @darjutak, and @julienrf if possible. Any thoughts on this?
I am not sure about adding a dedicated page on the site. It could also be an entry in the FAQ, for instance. Would you also add a link to that dedicated page to the top navigation bar?
By the way, beyond just the community representative, I wonder if the website should also cover the “governance” of the Scala Center in general. Currently, you can guess that there is an advisory board if you go to the “Corporate Membership” section, but I think we could do a better job at explaining the governance of the Center (including the role of the community representative) independently of that page.
I am not sure about adding a dedicated page on the site. It could also be an entry in the FAQ, for instance.
The tricky part with just putting into an FAQ section is that you lose out on the discoverability of it. Whereas if we have a dedicated page about it that various other places can link to, we really help the discoverability. If someone comes to the website and it's only part of the FAQ it's very unlikely they'll stumble on it.
Would you also add a link to that dedicated page to the top navigation bar?
I don't think we necessarily need it to be part of the top navigation, but in various places we could mention the community rep and link to this page. For example I could see there literally being a section on the home page mentioning the community rep with a link.
I think we could do a better job at explaining the governance of the Center (including the role of the community representative) independently of that page
Agree, but also, I'd note that it's not necessary to do an amazing, ambitious, complete job on this — not initially, anyway! — if it would mean it would take longer to address the most important issue here, which is to make it obvious to the community that they have a rep (and hopefully, eventually, two reps, again). This seems so basic and so important to me.
The current situation is very "beware of the leopard" (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/40705-but-the-plans-were-on-display-on-display-i-eventually), and mentioning something in an FAQ isn't much of an improvement. FAQs are supposed to be where you remind people of things that are documented elsewhere — they aren't the main place to document and publicize anything.
I also want to make sure we don't make the position of "community rep" too overblown. It's not a congress person (Americanism for member of parliament) representing the whole of Scala, but more like a person picking up community voices specifically to give advices to Scala Center, like a volunteer at a library asking to get more books from southern hemisphere.