05 May 09 - 15:19Asking for help with AgileAlliance.org

As the Internet Archive shows, the Agile Alliance's web site has a long history of embracing change. This is understandable, I suppose, given the growth of the Agile community itself and the need to keep up with these changes.

The most recent version has been around since late 2006. (I joined the Agile Alliance board in mid-2007.)

We've been discussing how to serve members of the Agile Alliance better for over a year now. In order to better serve our members better we figured we needed to know more about them, and generally provide people with a smooth experience as members. We also want to help members connect with each other and support each other (the fashionable term for which is now "social networking").

Our current web site doesn't do enough for those purposes, so we've decided to invest in improvements. We've written up our current ideas of our requirements, in two parts)

• here (managing the membership process) and
• here (providing "social networking" features)

There are two ways you can help.

First, whether or not you are a member, we'd appreciate feedback on the above list of features. Maybe there are some we haven't thought of, and maybe there are items you'd appreciate our adding.

Second, you can get us in touch with vendors or open source projects which you think would be a good fit for the above purposes.

Our reasoning at the moment is that we would prefer SaaS offerings, because the job of the Agile Alliance board is to think up ways to support the agile community, not to host or develop Web sites. And we think theses services - interacting with members and helping them connect with each other - are basic enough that it's likely there's a better implementation out there than we could get by funding a new project or spending time tinkering with servers. (We're open to changing our minds about that.)

We definitely wish to retain the possibility to develop further services on top of such a platform. We are also aware of the possibility of calling on volunteers: after all, we serve a community of top-notch software professionals. The chicken-and-egg issue is that, to effectively organize those of our members who'd like to serve as volunteers, we first need to reach out to our members in a more effective way!

Ready to help ? If so, please contact me, through comments or by email.

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