Drumbeat/website/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.

Scope: Phase One vs. Phase Two

The emphasis for Phase One is RAPID prototyping and implementation. The goal is to get to a point quickly where we can invite others to crowd-source and populate great suggested ideas, action and people. Phase Two will be more robust and public-facing, with a greater emphasis on graphic design, scalability, a more robust back-end CMS, etc.

Technology approach / CMS & CRM

Our latest thinking is that we may want to re-purpose an EXISTING Mozilla-led Drupal and CiviCRM install as Drumbeat's back-end platform, as a way to speed implementation and leverage more CRM muscle quickly. The new "Mozillians.org" site is still at the bug-fixing stage, but is now on a stable staging platform. The "Groups" block will map to Drumbeat's "Projects" stream. https://mozillians.stage.mozilla.com/

Our goal is to give the Drumbeat site its own unique look and feel, ideally using our own theme and front-end page designs (see early iterations below).

We need advice on the best way to tackle this. We need two sites that are similar in functionality and that share a CiviCRM back end. Are two installs needed? What's sustainable and secure? What's the best approach?

Target Communities

Leaders and social entrepreneurs making the web better. The audience for this early "Phase One" site is more apt to be technologically inclined, and already understand the issues to a degree. In Phase Two we will aim more explicitly to get beyond the "techosphere," and reach a more mainstream audience. But for phase one, we can assume an audience of more mavens and insiders.

Information Architecture

From an information architecture standpoint, the Phase One site is primarily about connecting PEOPLE and PROJECTS, plus raising awareness about a big upcoming EVENT, the Drumbeat Festival.

The people and projects need to cross reference and relate to each other in multiple ways. We need the ability to easily associate a particular PERSON, for example, with a project they're backing. Plus then easily see the other people who are joining with them to work on that project.

Timelines

The completed site will launch in early January.

Early Front-end Page Designs

Photoshop mock-up of phase one Front page (Nov 8; v28):

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):