Website workgroup meeting notes: 17th May 2022

0xTim · June 15, 2022, 7:01am

Attendees

Initial discussion around how to run meetings and organise the agenda. Agreed to go through previous meeting notes at the start of meetings to cover action items and give people the chance to review them before publishing.
We'll follow the SSWG model for now and rotate through people alphabetically for running meetings to share it out and make sure everyone gets aturn
Decided to create a channel in the Swift Open Source Slack for async work/admin

Discussion around access to the repository on GitHub. All SWWG members should have access to the repo and be able to merge PRs. 'Trivial' bug fixes or typos should just be merged. Any PRs in one of the more sensitive areas (as defined in the workgroup's governance doc) should be discussed first as a group and apply the correct process. Same applies for blog posts. We need to keep an eye out for blog post PRs as they need to go through the blog post review process
[AI] - @0xTim to add contributing guidelines to the repo and link to Swift.org - Swift.org website governance
@0xTim raised current difficulties in the blog process, can we improve this or at least stick to markdown.
[AI] - @TimTr and @tomerd to investigate with a post that’s currently in the pipeline
We have various communication channels to raise issues or discuss PRs. In general there's no issue to have these in public since it's all open source anyway. Larger sensitive queries can be taken into other channels
@daveverwer asked about whether to use personal forks or branches. Personal forks are preferred for ongoing work (longer lived PRs) but no restrictions around forks

@0xTim raised issue of deploying branches etc.
Current commits to main are deployed
desire to extend the CI such that PR reviewers can easily deploy a (temporary) version of the website based on the PR, with the goal of making the review process easier.
There are some issues that need to be worked outNeed to work out search engine bots and other issues. @daveverwer has experience for SPI in some of these issue
[AI] - @mishal_shah and @0xTim to investigate deploying branches and PRs and start thread for interested parties to discuss
CI is currently done using the Dockerfile, so anything can be added to that for CI
desire to extend the the suite and other PR checks for things like broken links, unit tests, inclusive language, etc.
[AI] - @tomerd to add a soundness script + docker task + work with @mishal_shah to add PR test for running it
[AI] - @mishal_shah add a test docker task (even if empty at this point)
@mschinis raised question of where CI infrastructure lives. For now it will live with the rest of the Swift projects CI

discussion about website evolution: what are our priorities and how to manage progress on both content development and technology, especially as they may be interlinked and depend on each other
@TimTr mentioned it’s a stated (long term) goal to use Swift to power the site
@kaishin suggested it would be a good idea to define our goals before trying to come up with a solution
@daveverwer mentioned we need to be careful how the technology pillar affects the content pillar. Ensuring they work well together is not trivial. Given how simple the website is right now, converting it to a different technology is easy. as we create more content and improve the design, it may make the conversion harder.
Both @James_Dempsey and @tomerd raised that content is the most important part of the site. Making immediate progress on content development and information design is highly desirable, even if it is based on a technology stack that is less than ideal - the content is what the users care about most and we should focus on the users.
@TimTr raised there are a number of parts of the site and each part may be best suited to a different technology depending on the content, e.g. DocC for documentation and a static site generator for the main site

@daveverwer has started putting together an overview of the structure of the content so we can see how to get forward
@kaishin has a comparison between different language sites to see gaps
discussion about creating focus groups for these two areas, so that they can potentially make progress in parallel where possible.
[AI] @0xTim to create channels in Slack for the different pillars/key initiatives (community, content, design, tech)
[AI] @0xTim and @tomerd to setup GH projects for helping manage these initiatives
@mschinis asked how are we going to approach design, can it be external, resource from Apple
@tomerd - different types of design. UI design is close to branding, would be great to outside help. Interest from Apple folks to help as well. Can bring design people in to help build and link up with Apple design as needed
[AI] (content folks): kick off discussions among interested parties, the goal is to come up with a proposal for what changes we can and should make immediately, using the existing tech stack
[AI] (tech folks): kick off discussions among interested parties, the goal is to come up with prototype for what the new tech stack may look like

continue to discuss priorities and to what degree we can move on these in parallel, while prioritizing what the users of the website care about.
we did not get to discuss the community aspect and how it ties to information design and content.
discussion about UX/UI and how we can make progress there, touch points with branding and marketing