[Pydotorg-redesign] Domain-specific content

[Skip Montanaro]

I suspect actually coming up with domain-specific content will be the
biggest barrier to contribution, even for domain experts.  Picking a person
and domain at random, if we asked Andrew Dalke to write a white paper on
Python and Bioinformatics, I suspect the major effort on his part would be
writing the paper, not stuffing it into the web site.  Sure, massaging that
content and making it available to others to edit would be more difficult
with ht2html than Zope, but at the moment we have no content to manage.  The
issue of how we manage the content is probably a secondary concern.  I think
we'll be very lucky if content management as opposed to content creation
becomes the primary barrier to a better site.

I think there are several of us who agree that adding domain-specific
content to the Python website would be worthwhile, at least from a marketing
standpoint.  Can we spend some time on that?  I'd like to flesh that out a
little to see if we can identify a structure for such content, what domains
we want to go after first, and maybe sound out some people for potential
submissions.  Once we're drowning in content we can see how hard it is to
maintain.

I'll toss out some thoughts about what I think such pages should/might
contain:

    * brief overview of the domain (just a paragraph or two, with perhaps a
      couple links to other introductory material)

    * applications in the domain which are written in Python

    * core and third-party modules and packages in Python which support the
      domain

    * references to domain-specific websites which support the use of Python
      in the domain

Back in April I (probably prematurely) came up with a possible starter list
of domains and domain experts:

    Scientific Computing                Eric Jones
    XML                                 Uche Ogbuji
    Data Visualization/3D Graphics      Prabhu Ramachandran or Michel Sanner
    Web Services                        Mark Pilgrim
    Relational Databases                Andy Dustman or Federico di Gregorio

Here are a couple more:

    Web Application Servers             Paul Everett, Andrew Kuchling,
                                        Geoffrey Talvola, many others
    Bioinformatics                      Andrew Dalke

There are obviously many other people who could contribute in these areas.
The names above are just those that popped into my head.

I don't know how many domain-specific pages or sections we want on the site.
I think the above would be a good start.  If we can get content for four or
five areas I think that would encourage other people to contribute.

Skip