Well testing day is done. As someone that is fairly new to the day to day of the project it looked pretty successful to me.

[Dave Neary]

Hi all,

On 06/21/2012 08:50 AM, Itamar Heim wrote:
> On 06/21/2012 08:04 AM, Robert Middleswarth wrote:
>> 5) We really need a review of the current structure of the websites and
>> tweak it some as some resources are really hard to find. Simple things
>> like adding a top level menu for the wiki most projects have something
>> like a documentation tab that points to a predefined wiki page with
>> instructions and links to other parts of the wiki covering important
>> topics.. Adding a simple URL like wiki.ovirt.org that redirects to
>> www.ovirt.org/wiki . There have been other idea's tossed out in the list
>> many of them are good ideas and simple to do but unless someone really
>> pushes them they tend to go no where. Maybe an official suggesting list
>> Editable by all and a todo list (editable by just infra team member) to
>> help capture those idea's
>
> agree.
> I believe Dave Neary started looking at this.
> Dave?

Yes! This week we've been busy with last minute finishing touches to a 
project that we're launching next week, and I was giving a keynote 
presentation at a conference, but indeed I've been talking to Itamar and 
others from oVirt over the past few weeks about how we can help oVirt.

We have a grand plan, and a major part of it is to refocus the content 
of the website and the wiki on the mùain target audience of the oVirt 
project - cost-sensitive sysadmins setting up relatively small 
virtualisation networks to test, or deploying virtualisation in 
organisations with little or no budget. That hypothetical target user 
wants great technology for free and loves open source because it means 
he doesn't have to ask for approval before getting to work, and he can 
play around with it to make it suit his needs. And his needs are the 
ability to get started with no outside help fairly easily based on the 
documentation and software available on the site.

Our priorities for the site and the wiki fall out of that

  - focus on the documentation for getting started with one server 
(engine and nodes on the same machine), getting started with a minimal 
multi-host set-up (one engine running on a laptop, two nodes, with up to 
5 or 6 VMs), integrating with Gluster for storage, etc.
  - Fix the navigation and organisation of the wiki, and start building 
up a wiki team to ensure it stays clean over time, so that the wiki 
becomes a resource for users to help each other
  - Ensure that packages for oVirt are available not just for Fedora but 
also for other popular distros

Following on from that, we want to help promote the project with 
articles, conference outreach, organising local meet-ups around the 
world and so on. For all of this, I'm personally more interested in 
helping build those skills within the project than in doing them short-term.

>> 8) Look at ways to help members write blogs posts about ovirt and
>> providing a way for people to find them. Blog posts are great ways to
>> work on new section of the documentation and/or get publicity for a new
>> feature. My first ovirt build wasn't based on the wiki but a getting
>> started blog post by Jason Brooks. There are always great topic idea out
>> there. Off the top of my head I can think of several topics. These
>> include things like how to use the glusterfs with oVirt, processor types
>> and how to get the most out of clusters, Exporting a VM, Importing from
>> VMware, Importing from Xen. Those are just topics off the top of my head
>> I am sure there are many more. Personally I have never been a fan of
>> planet.xxx sites but I personally have found using a wordpress mu and
>> allowing people to post and let the good stuff float to the top of the
>> sites really does well. Granted we are not going to see a hundred
>> articles a day but a place for people to post might make it easier for
>> people to write blog posts and for other people to find them.
>
> Dave?

Yes, promotion is definitely something we need to beef up. As oVirt gets 
adopted, we will have more reviews, how-tos, and so on mentioning it, 
and we should gather these together periodically on ovirt.org. And Jason 
is a member of the OSAS team, and I will definitely want to get him and 
others blogging about oVirt (whether it's things like getting started 
tutorials as you mention, or new features that are getting done, or 
oVirt workshops and conferences that are coming up, whatever).

I'll follow up with a little more detail on what I think we should be 
doing short, medium and long term to ensure that oVirt is a great success.

Thanks,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards Team, Red Hat
Phone: +33 9 50 71 55 62