Those goals sounds good to me. I would emphasize that a goal of the website should be to route users to more specific resources (e.g. this discourse) or perhaps also a “Pangeo Book” that can serve as a more detailed technical guide, separate from the main site.
Also, while I agree Pangeo is not one stack of cloud infrastructure, we are in fact still running our Pangeo Cloud hubs, and people are using them. So we can’t neglect that completely.
I would distinguish between the general public website vs. some sort of technical user guides (i.e. Pangeo Book). The general public website should introduce Pangeo to someone who has never heard of it. The technical user guides should be a place to aggregate the knowledge from this community. Perhaps the technical user guides, particularly around cloud, could be done in collaboration with ESIP and / or Pythia.
I think those are all possible goals for a visitor to the website. We should have a way to route people based on what they are looking for. Not to get too agile here, but would user stories help with this process?
http://gallery.pangeo.io/ is supposed to be the place to see examples, although it could use some TLC (particularly since we had to restrict Pangeo binder usage). IMO this forum can also serve as an important knowledge base, particularly if we take some time to curate / aggregate useful posts.
The high level goal for updating the website, and specifically the landing page, is to make sure we communicate an agreed upon definition of what Pangeo is and route expected audience for that page to other information they might be looking for
The low level goal for updating the website is to fix things that are out of date
We spent most of the time discussing the first objective “Who is the audience and what are they looking for?”
For the audience of folks that are completely new to Pangeo and need an answer to "What is Pangeo?” I would propose a section that conveys:
Pangeo is a community that collaborates on open source tools for science.
Pangeo is a community working to centralize a decentralized ecosystem of open science projects and tools.
The Pangeo Community has demonstrated bundling many scientific packages to achieve science on the cloud.
For the What is Pangeo? section, we may also want some diagrams to convey the messages listed above and the Pangeo community works on (“an opinionated?”) stack of tools, there is an abstract set of components and principles that describe any Pangeo solution.
For the audience of folks that are trying to find information on how to get started, example projects or how to get involved, we will want to identify those different types of users and guide them to what they need.
I just wanted to put in plug to please consider including GeoCAT in the list of core or affiliated packages. GeoCAT a growing collection of geoscience-specific data operators and plotting routines that consume (and typically produce) Xarrays. It is also Dask compatible. GeoCAT is developed and supported by NCAR with help from the earth sciences communities. Thanks!
Hey @rabernat thanks for asking about how y’all can support. @annefou and I have started to generate some ideas and I would love to have some working sessions with Anne when I am in Europe May 11-June 6.
I am thinking that to get things started before then we can start working in parallel:
Every week, have a website working session. Alternating weeks, use this hour to either (1) reviewing the existing content and making issues for something that should be updated or removed or (2) updating content (i.e. working on tickets). We’ll have to see if this distribution of time to working sessions makes sense. How should this work with pangeo community meetings? Perhaps they could be extended to work on the website?
I can make the community meeting this week to kick this off.
Start working on re-organizing the site into 2 portals, one which is the general public website and another on technical user guides. I think this is where I need some advice on the design side. Should we have a landing page which acts as the general public site that just links to the technical user guides (where and how should those links be made clear).
I have blocked time to make progress on the website questions Friday (I previously stated I would come up with a list for the community meeting tomorrow). Since I haven’t made progress and have some conflicting obligations tomorrow, I will join the next community meeting the 27th, apologies for the delay @rabernat I understand the website is a valuable asset to our community.
I made an inventory of the site which resulted in some minor text edits, but I would also like to go over some high and low level questions I captured Pangeo Site Inventory - Google Docs and I’m hoping I can attend the Pangeo Community meeting next week to discuss. @annefou if you want to contribute comments async that would be super.
Thanks @aimeeb Your analysis of the website is great! I will add a few comments in your document but overall we are inline.
On my side, I have been looking at how other communities present themselves, what makes a community more inclusive and diverse, etc. I think it is also important aspects to take into account while restructuring the website.
@rabernat I know we discussed posting high level questions from the inventory document here, but I decided to open github issues for a few high priority issues, targeting the content on the home / landing page.
This is a great example of jumping straight into answering the question of “What is Pangeo and why pangeo” from the tech stack perspective. I definitely think we can copy that example of jumping quickly into a notebook environment and explaining that the tech stack the pangeo community works on promotes data-proximate computing resources and libraries like Zarr, Dask and xarray to perform lazy loading and distributed analysis. I think what we might add is some beginning and / or end explanation about how Pangeo is a community and an ecosystem and how folks can get involved.
Here is the PR with a suggested update to the Pangeo homepage (or at least a first attempt at such an update!). Please feel free to comment and edit! We intend for this first draft to be a conversation starter from the community on how we can improve our website’s homepage.
Below is a screenshot of our suggested homepage update (keeping in mind that I am new to rst and so the formatting can certainly be improved upon!). Rationales for all our choices are indicates in the PR linked above.
Thanks @paigem and @aimeeb for your great work! I’ve added some comments to the slides. The main one would be to check (if not already done) @rabernat slides, in particular Pangeo OGC March 2022 - Speaker Deck. I’m sure Ryan would agree to share content. There are great slides or ideas in there you could probably reuse!
I think an important point would be that the notebook should be easily reproducible by a new user. Currently with Pangeo binder shut down, it’s difficult to have a scalable enough environment…
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