Talk:OLPC volunteers portal

Questions

Is this OLPC specific, or could the idea of a volunteers portal be generalized to apply to various open content organizations? (For instance, would it be possible to create a "how to make a portal" as a final deliverable?)
What are the criteria for project success? This is not necessarily an "I'm going to produce deliverables A, B, and C" but instead a "by the end of the project, X, Y, and Z will have happened," where X, Y, and Z are concrete things we can aim for.
How many people can work on this project at once? How can we involve/reach as many people as possible with the project?

This could definitely be applied to other organizations. A step-by-step "how to make a portal" based on work done here would probably be unwieldy, but a more generally applicable guide to creating a newcomer-friendly portal sounds like a great deliverable.

Should edit the project description on the main page, then. :) I've added a bit of stuff. Mchua 13:57, 19 July 2007 (EDT)

Defining success might become a little tricky. Certainly, the most basic level of success would involve creating the portal itself, but beyond that the success of the portal would be based on its useability and user-friendliness. These are harder to quantify - do you know of any good metrics for this?
A small group (1-4 people) could easily work on this efficiently; larger groups would probably need to spend more organizational time, but would be manageable. Since a lot of information will be needed (what OLPC communities are there? what tutorials and guides already exist? so on and so forth), volunteers could also contribute to the project in a meaningful way without getting in anyone's way or having to commit completely to the project.
A side note - depending on how many guides and tutorials exist, an offshoot of this project could also involve creation and organization of guides/tutorials.

Check out the Wikipedia welcome wagon (search around and leave messages on some of their talk pages, even) and how it works - being able to include information about that (links!) would be great.
Other good volunteer portals or programs: the volunteering section of http://mysociety.org, the frontpage of http://kiva.org and http://donorschoose.org.