Labs/Site 2.0/Site components
Based on a variety of discussions I've had with the Labs team, the future Labs website will consist of six components. These components are not necessarily separate tools, they can just be thought of as discrete-but-integrated parts of the greater whole.
Contents
Main Labs main site
As the primary face of Mozilla Labs, this would live at labs.mozilla.org, and would include:
- a general Labs weblog
- pointers to all projects
- featured projects list
- links to other site components (Aggregator, ideashower-alike, community commons, etc. - see below)
- a Labs Planet-like system that aggregates posts and discussions happening within the project
- etc
Community framework
A straightforward set of community building and engagement tools -- user profiles, groups, etc. A "community commons" of sorts that would allow contributors to be largely self-organizing and autonomous in terms of creating groups, having discussions, moving projects forward, and really just developing the ties that make a community a community. It would not include developer tools such as bug databases or code repos.
Project sites for developers
When a project gains enough critical mass to become a full-blown development project, it gets a more polished external-facing project site that works to recruit more contributors, keeps interested observers (i.e. tech press, industry observers) up to date on project development highlights, etc. This is closer to what the current labs site does in terms of project pages than, say, the community framework would provide. This would still not include bug databases and code repos, but could include suggestions for where to host projects (google code, mozdev, etc) and how to hook those feeds into the project site.
Project sites would be maintainable by the developers themselves, not requiring intervention from Mozilla staff beyond the initial creation of the site.
Project sites for users
When a project is developed enough to be publicly launched to a larger user community (whether that be a beta, or an initial "final" release), it gets a very polished external user-facing site. This is akin to the "getfirefox.com" site, only with more obvious ties back to the developer/community/contributor side of things. User-facing and Dev-facing sites should cross-reference one another a great deal, so as to encourage users to graduate to bug reporting, testing, and other forms of contribution.
Ideally these would be developer maintainable, and could possibly be a sub-section/page of the developer-facing site.
Idea contribution tool
This is the concept series submission tool, that allows contributors to submit their ideas, mockups, and prototypes.
Aggregation tool
A system for harvesting relevant discussion and posts from the internet-at-large. Sort of like Lizard Feeder (http://feeds.mozilla.com/) only with Labs-specific feeds and searches and whatnot. Not so much a "labs planet" as a way to pull in and filter those posts and discussions that are happening external to the project as a whole.
