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Relaunch Plan
Over the last few months, we have laid out some rather comprehensive plans for future work on PlanetMath. However, since there are currently only a handful of part-time volunteers available to carry out these plans, it may take a long time to carry them all out. Thus, in the interest of carrying out the site relaunch in a timely fashion, this document has been drawn up. Its purpose is to select out from our plans a minimal subset of items which should be done before relaunch so as to present newcomers to Planet Math with an attractive and functional website. The idea of this is not to discourage work on items not listed here but rather to priorities our efforts and focus our meagre resources so as to carry out a successful relaunch in a timely fashion.
As things currently stand, we have a shoestring budget and a handful of volunteers putting in about half the equivalent of a full-time worker. If the relaunch and advertising campaign is to occur sometime around the beginning of the school year, that leaves around 20 weeks, which works out to about 400 person-hours of work. To be on the safe side, we perhaps should be sure that the minimal plan assumes no more than 300 person-hours of work available.
This plan is focused on the core functionality of encyclopedia, forums, problems, solutions, and collections. These features already have been developed and deployed so what remains is to polish them up and make them friendly for users. In contrast, while we are also working towards features such as centralized bibliographies, retrodigitization toolchain, editorial review system, and facilities for compiling derived works, much more time will be required before those are ready for release to the general public, so relaunch should not have to wait until they are ready.
- those long-term items would be better made into "future" tickets and publicized via our "preview" service, see #34
Beta testing with the current user community has been going on for about a month since the switchover to the new platform. In a few weeks, the pace will pick up as the focus group materializes.
- See #5 for initial programming issues; further requirements will be gathered from the focus group and added to #9, #13, #14, #18, #22, #27 or #32 or some other to-be-created future issue, depending on how easy it will be to implement the desired/required features.
Also, work on documentation will feed back into testing since we will test the program to make sure that things indeed work as described.
- See #3 as an entry point for user-level documentation; some further comments below may be turned into more specific tickets.
An important part of making a computer program friendly to users is providing good documentation. The user level documentation for Planetary be divided into two parts. The first part will be based on the current release notes with screenshots. It will give an overview of what the program can do and serve as a quick start guide.
The second part will serve as a reference for several aspects of the program which could use more detailed explanation. It will be based upon some of the existing noosphere documentation, but will need to be revised and completed. It will treat the following topics.
- Menus. See #43.
- TeX. See #44.
- Graphics. See #45.
- Authority model. See #46.
- Automatic linking. See #47.
- Scoring. See #48.
- Collections. See #49.
In addition to this technical documentation, there should be documentation of the workflow and social aspects of the site. This needs should be taken care of by the "New User Guide" and the "Community Guidelines", respectively.
The way "moderation" works on PlanetMath is also a work-in-progress, see #53. Whatever policy we have should be be clearly documented. If we expect things to change, we should probably make a Preview of changes.
In order to get the ball rolling quickly with newcomers, it is good to start with a reasonable cache of initial content. When it comes to the encyclopaedia, of course, we already have plenty of content from the past ten years. When it comes to the new problem, solution and collections areas however, our offerings are sparse. Thus, we would like to fill in these sections by importing some public-domain books. We will start with the following books:
- "The Calculus" by Davis and Brenke We already ran this book through InftyOCR and posted the edited results as a collection with exercises attached as problems on one of the earlier Planetary test sites. The last few chapters still need to be edited and the results posted on the current site.
The remaining three books have been retrodigitized by Project Gutenberg:
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"The First Steps in Algebra" by G. A. Wentworth This is an elementary school level introduction to algebra complete with plenty of exercises and answers to them. (A solution manual also exists, but isn't on PG.)
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"A Course of Pure Mathematics" by G. H. Hardy A fine follow-up to a calculus book which introduces the basics of real and complex analysis.
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"On Riemann's Theory of Algebraic Functions and their Integrals" by Felix Klein While this book doesn't contain exercises for the reader, it is a classic in its field and goes well with the coverage of Riemann surfaces in the PM encyclopaedia. Among other things, it thus can serve as an illustration of cross-indexing and bibliographic references.
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See #35
There are a few loose ends in the legal department which it would be good to straighten out before inviting the general public to the site.
We should make sure that we are positioned in the DMCA safe harbor. Although we filed a designated agent with the Copyright Office a few years back, our form no longer appears on the Copyright Office's list, so we may need to file again. Also, once that is straightened out, there is a more-or-less standardized notice we need to post on our website.
Likewise, we should try to secure common carrier status. Again, this is an issue of posting the appropriate legalese as well as double-checking that our policies are sufficiently hands-off to qualify.
A few years back, we also discussed and drafted a new user agreement. However, we didn't proceed further because we ran into what we called "good questions for a good lawyer" --- issues which would require the input of someone who is familiar with how things are likely to play out in court given the current legal climate. Now that there has been some time for suitable case law to appear and our founder is studying law, perhaps we could get these questions answered and finish this project. Once we do, we should make signing off on this agreement part of the registration process for new users and require that existing users sign off on it before logging back in. To minimise disruptions, that should happen before we solicit new users.
- See #50
As long as we are going to invite people in, we should make some attempt to solicit donations. Three suitable means come to mind: patronage, membership, and previews.
Since we have talked about implementing a patronage system along the lines of what 750 words had for some time and agree that it is worth trying, it might be time to go ahead and do it.
- See #14
We should let newcomers know about the PM non-profit and invite them to join. While it will likely take more time to get the PM organization documents in order and come up with perks and incentives, for the purpose of a minimal plan, we could at least come up with a page or so which lets people know that there is a non-profit organization running PM, say a few words describing this organization and the key people behind it, and how one becomes a member. Whilst this might not elicit much of a response, at least it is a start and begins preparing the way for future membership drives.
- See #42
The general idea of "previews" was introduced in a letter to the advisory board. Basically, it would provide a way of showing what sorts of new and exciting features are in the works and suggest ways in which people who are interested in seeing these features completed sooner could donate cash, make in-kind donations, or volunteer their effort. In a few days, we should have such a preview for the books project ready and, with a little work, integrate it into the website.
- See #34
While discussing PM, after the last LISPNYC meeting, Pierre pointed out that the PM website is bland and boring as compared with the flyer, which looks exciting and interesting. Whilst redoing the look and feel of the whole website might be too tall an order, maybe we could at least have Fabrizio design us a more visually appealing home page. This way, people who run across PM when surfing the web or who have a look at the website advertised in the flyer would hopefully be more likely to be drawn in and have a look.
- See #38
We've made an effort to break things down in both the PlanetMath and Planetary trackers, this should be summarized and shared with all relevant parties; efforts should be made to keep things realistic so that we can stay on track! (As you'll notice: the minimal plan has been cross-referenced with tickets.)
- https://github.com/holtzermann17/planetmath-docs/issues/milestones
- https://github.com/KWARC/planetary/issues/milestones
And see screenshots below for current state as of April 20, 2013. It's probably worth revisiting these in weekly meetings.
See #11.
It's not clear that this stuff fits into our "minimal plan" but it may happen along the same timeline, and provide some added benefits.
- install bibliography system, download library of congress QA section, add some copyright renewal metadata to a few items, see #41.