Project Scope

Values

• Transparency: It should be easy to understand what is going on with JA-SIG, where the software is, what progress has been made, how to get involved, whom to contact. It should be clear who the committers are on various projects, who makes up the JA-SIG Board and various steering committees and working groups. The website should showcase the JA-SIG membership and commercial affiliates.
• Resilience: The JA-SIG website hosting infrastructure should not be fragile. It should be well understood how to bring it back online when it goes down. It should be backed up regularly and have good uptime.
• Marketability: The JA-SIG website should be attractive, pleasant, and effective in communicating the JA-SIG message.
• Ease of editing in oft-edited ways. Common communication needs should be easy to meet. Uncommon needs should be possible to meet. In particular, it should be easy to post about news, newsletter availability, events, releases. It should be easy to edit the memberships of boards, committees, committer lists, etc.

Goals

From these values result certain goals:

• Good design of information architecture. Much has been articulated about the importance of information architecture in effective website design. If a new ja-sig.org is to succeed, it needs to be well-information-architected in keeping with the named values.
• Migration to a more mainstream content management system. Hypercontent is esoteric, poorly adopted, and has poor usability. Migration to a more mainstream opensource content management system will increase uptime, confidence in our solution, ability to recover from problems, and will set the stage for a more effective and featureful website going forward.
• Effective branding: well-recognized, well-used, well-factored re-usable logos to better establish a JA-SIG brand

Scope

Given these values and goals, this is the scope of this project:

Includes

This project includes:

• Information architecture and website design
• Design and development of a brand and logos
  • Logo for JA-SIG itself
  • Logo for JA-SIG Member Institution
  • Logo for JA-SIG Commercial Affiliate
• Migration of existing website content into a new CMS demonstrating the new brand, logos, and especially information architecture
• ja-sig.org and uPortal.org
• Implementation of a Contact Us page / section including a web form for sending email. This to be initially implemented to email the Board, who will then route the messages where they really need to go.

Does not include

• Content in the Confluence wiki. While small units of content may tactically be pulled up to the website layer (committer listings, e.g.), vast swaths of Confluence wiki content (e.g., the uPortal manual) are not to be included in this effort
• the CAS website (http://www.ja-sig.org/products/cas/). While the CAS website would benefit from additional attention and might welcome migration off of Hypercontent, since it is better architected and designed, the margin of benefit to be gained in revisiting it now is thinner. The idea is to execute on ja-sig.org and uportal.org and then re-assess.