How should we update the Pangeo website to better serve the community?

@annefou and I are developing ideas about how to update the Pangeo website.

Our goals are:

  • Deliver the message Pangeo is an open source community to support tools for open science.
  • Make it clear Pangeo is not one stack of cloud infrastructure.
  • Make Pangeo website more accessible to newcomers and guide them in their first steps with the
    Pangeo community.

Questions for this post:

  • Are those the right goals for the website :point_up: ?
  • What is a need of the existing and potential pangeo community that the website can fill?
  • Is it to help people get involved? Is it to understand how to deploy or use open science software? Is it to see examples of pangeo in action?
  • Are any of those needs being met partially in other mediums?

Next steps:

  • Create some messaging about rebranding Pangeo as an open source open science community.
  • Get feedback on this post from Pangeo stakeholders and the wider community (post to twitter?)
  • Inventory the website and decide if there is material that should be removed completely or is out of date and confusing.
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Thanks for taking the lead here Amy! :rocket:

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.

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@aimeeb - you asked about my the slides I shared at today’s meeting. They are online here:

Happy to share the Keynote version as well of that helps.

We had a lively discussion about this during the Pangeo Community Meeting just now (Meeting Schedule and Notes — Pangeo documentation)

To recap what was discussed:

  1. 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
  2. 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?”

  1. 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:

    1. Pangeo is a community that collaborates on open source tools for science.
    2. Pangeo is a community working to centralize a decentralized ecosystem of open science projects and tools.
    3. The Pangeo Community has demonstrated bundling many scientific packages to achieve science on the cloud.
  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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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!

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I’m checking in on this effort. @aimeeb - how can we support your work on the website?

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:

  1. 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.

  1. 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).
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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.

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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.

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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.

I also think Practical Tips to Build a Fantastic Community Homepage can be interesting for us to understand what to add and what to drop. I am looking forward to be working with you on the website.

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@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.

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I often show this people this <3 min video Matt Rocklin made for AMS in 2018 to showcase the Pangeo tech stack.

It covers a lot of ground, and everyone has 3 minutes, right? :slight_smile:

I know it’s not a good template for the Pangeo intro video, but I think it would be great to have updated version of this!

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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.

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@paigem and I made great progress today, we:

Paige created an example of what the new homepage could look like (Paige to add link to issue and screenshot)

We also worked on content for a video for the homepage:

Next steps for video:

  • Revisit the content in the intro slides with whomever has input
  • Refine the content in the pangeo demo (or start from scratch)
  • Create the narrative
  • Create a rehearsal video
  • Get volunteers to participate in the video
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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.

Huge thanks to @aimeeb for joining me today for this in-person hack! :smile:

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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’ll try to have a look at the rest too!

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About the demo notebook, why not use some existing content from Pangeo Gallery? There is probably some simple enough and nice notebook to use there?

My go to example when I wanna show Pangeo is Sea Surface Altimetry Data Analysis — Pangeo Gallery documentation.

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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for anyone tracking the website update conversation, I wanted to share a copy of this post from the similar github issue. Please comment there with feedback :pray:

In addition to a lot of the website’s contents being out of date, this repository is also unlicensed and would be difficult to re-license at this point due to the large number of contributors. I would like to propose that we start afresh with a new website and gradually add pages necessary based on the currently relevant information from the new website.

Proposed website start (forked from xarray.dev): maxrjones/pangeo.io
Deployed proposed website: pangeo-io-git-main-max-jones-projects.vercel.app
Proposed timeline:
September 9 - Max fills out the rest of the meeting / showcase pages
September 9 - 18: Solicit feedback on framework, decide whether to move forward with a new website
September 18 - October 8: adjust high-level plan for the website content based on steering council meetings, update sponsorship page
(if we decide to move forward with the new website)
October 8: migrate maxrjones/pangeo.io to pangeo-data github oganization
October 8 - October 31: add new pages as neededwith at least one week for review on each page
October 31: Deploy at pangeo.io, publish a blog post announcement

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