Matrix Channel Reorganization ideas?

Hey, I’ve been looking at reviving the project to create a template / format / set of icons for our Matrix spaces and channels (Guidelines / Templates / Designs for Matrix Channels (#2) · Issues · fedora / Design / Fedora Design / Logos and Branding / Fedora Project + App Logos · GitLab). It seems like there is a lot under the “Project Teams” category, and the thing is, many start with “Fedora” in their name but some don’t, so it makes finding something in alpha order in the client a difficult task since there’s two layers and so many individual items (ballpark ~50?)

I did a little card sort just on the items under “Project Teams” (although the categories that fell out of it might better accommodate some channels under other categories), a preview here:

Full board is here: Penpot - Design Freedom for Teams

Obviously I’m open to any changes in the sort here, just figured putting something together to start might be helpful.

The other thing is in going through the list of channels trying to figure out which ones need icons… a couple channels seem kind of dead / unused:

  • Information - “Everything you need to know to get started!” - I scrolled back a year and found nothing and gave up
  • Ask Fedora Post-o-matic - “This is an experiment with the Matrix ⟺ Discourse integration” - I guess the experiment didn’t work?

Thoughts?

(Note SIGs could be split up more too - there’s language SIGs, spin/deliverable SIGs, and topic SIGs)

Another thing that would be good to work on is the revamping of most if not all of those icons to get them all in a single coherent style. Currently some of them use a shape similar to Badges, others use full sized image work, others use just their subproject’s logo with no background at all.

And for the ones that don’t have icons themselves, most of them use just the Fedora logo while others don’t have an icon at all.

(That’s what I’m working on :slight_smile: see the referenced ticket: Guidelines / Templates / Designs for Matrix Channels (#2) · Issues · fedora / Design / Fedora Design / Logos and Branding / Fedora Project + App Logos · GitLab )

Oops, should have properly read it before speaking out :sweat_smile:

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It’s all good - unexpectedly discourse sort of mangles the link text to make it hard to read :-/

Isn’t this akin to designing logos for each channel? Or are you suggesting designing logos for the top level categories you created in the blue sticky notes? if it’s the former, I think folks would be happy but it sounds like a lot of work. If it’s the later I think that’s more reasonable.

I want to reserve this topic to talk about the organization of the channels and less about the artwork (happy to discuss that in the ticket.)

FWIW, I’m fine with moving things around and renaming them a bit. A few links would need to be updated in Fedora Magazine’s documentation, but it wouldn’t be much.

I think these groups may work. This approach is quite common and the names of the groups are familiar and self-explanatory.

But for the sake of brainstorming I am trying to think what would be alternative ways of grouping. And one idea is to group by the target audience:

For example,

  • Package Maintainer category would contain: Fedora QA, Fedora CI, Fedora Devel, Fedora Rel Eng,
  • Designer category would have: Fedora Design, Fedora Marketing, Fedora Apps
  • Desktop User would have Fedora Workstation, Fedora Silverblue, Fedora KDE…

Also, afaik, these approaches can coexist. So we can have one main “Fedora” space organized in a more structured way as you described. But we also can create “Discover Fedora by Role”-space where categories would represent the recommended lists of rooms for a certain role in the project.

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This is because I set it up one weekend late at night once we finally got the hosting contract through after a year of bureaucracy, and rather than waiting longer to get icons done properly, I just literally grabbed badges that seemed kind of thematically appropriate for each channel. This was never meant to be long-term. Thanks Máirín for working on it now!

It’s just replacing it with the page title. That makes sense for some sites, but Gitlab stashes a lot in there. You can make it say whatever you want by using Markdown link syntax, like [this is the text](https://example.org). In the web UI, you can select text and then paste the URL while that text is selected and it’ll make it a link automatically.

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Hey we’ve got lots of icon artwork coming in from Outreachy participants and it’d be nice to start using it. I am happy to reconfigure the Fedora space if I was given access. I am familiar with how to do it since I manage the ChRIS space as well. Just LMK, would love to get the Outreachy work up.

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Sounds good to me. I’m in a training thing this morning but I’ll look at what I need to do to give you the power when I get a chance.

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Feel free to ping me or @nb too if we can help out… and looking forward to the reorg and new icons!

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This is something I want to bring up with the Element/Matrix folks. The basic problem is that grouping rooms into spaces is an add-on — the rooms still exist on their own, and people could even group them into their own spaces. So, if we have the room named just “Council”, that’ll be confusing to people seeing it outside of the space. (My suggestion for the UI change is: if the first word in the room title is the same as the space it’s organized under, don’t show it.)