Drumbeat/website/brief

Phase One Web Site Brief

Overview & Goals

Mozilla Drumbeat will find and connect people, ideas and actions that make the web better. Drumbeat is launching a PHASE ONE web site. The major goals of this early, beta-type site are to:

• Showcase compelling PEOPLE & PROJECTS making the web better. These are the two major content streams, and the heart of the site.
• Crowdsource great new content. Make it easy for others to submit their own PEOPLE & PROJECT IDEAS, using templates and workflow we provide.
• Showcase and get people excited about a big upcoming EVENT: the Drumbeat Festival in June 2010. Make it sexy and trumpet key values: genius ideas, rubbing shoulders with the web’s leading lights, and the prospect of Internet “fame and fortune.”

In addition, the Phase One site will:

• Encourage the best content to float to the top. Get an early sense of which project ideas have the most traction and interest with our audiences. Use a simple voting & reviewing layer (probably something like Digg) to make this easy.
• Showcase local events. Trumpet the big festival event at the center -- but also local events and opportunities for participation around the edges and in your community.
• Be easy to share socially and push content to the places people are already at. Avoid re-inventing the wheel or recreating redundant infrastructure. Embed or aggregate existing third-party tools and external content.

Emphasis on rapid prototyping for Phase One

• The emphasis for Phase One is RAPID prototyping and implementation; we want to prioritize speed over perfection.
• This means we may be willing to set aside much of the development work done for this early "phase one" site later on in the process. So rapid prototyping is more important than long-term durability or a perfect site.
• The goal is to get to a point quickly where we can model fleshed out feature projects that show people the kinds of ideas Drumbeat is interested in, and then effectively crowd-source great new project ideas to get into the pipeline.
• The "Phase Two" site will be more robust and public-facing, with a greater emphasis on graphic design, scalability, a more robust back-end CMS, etc.

Technology approach

• The phase one Drumbeat web site will be built on a Drupal / CiviCRM platform.
• Wherever possible, the Drumbeat site should leverage work completed for another site, "Mozillians.org." This site has been built on a Drupal / CiviCRM platform, and shares much of the CMS and CRM functionality needed for Drumbeat
• Mozillians.org site is still at the bug-fixing stage and is due to launch in mid-December, but is now on a stable staging platform here: https://mozillians.stage.mozilla.com/
• The goal is to produce two sites that are similar in functionality and that share a common CiviCRM back end. Since many of the donations requirements and people / relationship data overlap between the two projects, it's important that they share a common CRM platform.

We need advice to help decide on the best technological approach to achieving this goal.

Key Questions

Given that we need two sites that a) share a large amount of Drupal functionality, and b) need to share a common CiviCRM back end...

* Should we do a multi-site install, with two sites leveraging the same code base?

• If this multi-site approach is feasible, what's the best way to resource and support that approach?
  • How do we ensure smooth workflow and back-and-forth between the Mozillians.org team and Drumbeat web site team?
  • What's the best way to divide up the work?
    • In terms of Drupal vs. CiviCRM work?
    • In terms of specific roles? (e.g., graphic design & theming, lead Drupal development / customization, advice & support, quality assurance, etc.)

• What specific parts of Mozillians.org does the Drumbeat site want to leverage?
  • In terms of Drupal functionality?
  • In terms of CiviCRM functionality?

• What other modules and custom work do we need to add to get the feature set we want?
  • e.g., if we used the Mozillians organic groups set up for Drumbeat 'projects,' we'd need to add things like a blog aggregator and wiki
• Timelines. What's realistic by deadline. How do we go faster?
• How can we protect the integrity of Drumbeat's front-end designs? Graphic design and usability are important priorities for Drumbeat.
  • How do we ensure the front-end work we're doing in Photoshop is actually implementable?

Drumbeat's CRM requirements

Online Donations

• Online fundraising will be a key component for Drumbeat. All fundraising will flow through CiviCRM
• We need the ability to fundraise directly for Mozilla, but also for specific individual community-led projects as well. Drumbeat may eventually function as a kind of "Kiva for the open web," making it easy to crowdsource volunteer help ~and~ financial help for a large number of individual projects.
• Creation, customization and management of campaign specific pages for general drumbeat donations and peoject donations through Drupal.
• Ability to pull donor lists for specific projects and use within CiviMail.

Community segmenting & sub-segmenting

• Drumbeat will have an e-newsletter, with regular updates & fundraising asks
• We need the ability to segment our list of Drumbeat supporters and participants so that we customize content and asks based on the community's a) specific interests (e.g., digital divide vs. mobile vs. privacy), roles (project initiator, project volunteer, festival participant, etc.) and geography.

Integration with Mozillians.org and other Mozilla projects

• Part of the narrative of Drumbeat is making participants feel like they're part of a larger Mozilla community
• For example, many Drumbeat participants should probably also appear in the Mozillians.org community directory
• We want to avoid creating standalone silos of community members and donors, and instead build on a shared and scalable CRM platform

Timelines

The completed site will launch in early January 2010.

Photoshop mock-up of phase one Festival page (Nov 8; v8):

Photoshop mock-up of phase one Project page -- Mozilla-led project (Nov 8; v16):

Photoshop mock-up of phase one Project page -- Community-led project (Nov 8; v16):