Productionalize, Maybe

This blogpost is brought to you by myself + Atul Varma.

This week, I am working to streamline the process for contribution to webmaker Projects. Currently, that means fixing the process so it works internally, and then setting the stage for larger community involvement. I  pulled together some of my thoughts on the current process and a strawman to get things rolling in the vidcast below.

(WARNING: there is some Jess Klein singing action goin' on)

 

Note: I made Chloe look less skilled than she actually is for the purpose of highlighting some flaws in our current process.  Chloe is an uber talented designer and educator, and as I have said many times- there is so much more to the design process than code (ideation, asset creation, designing learning experiences etc.)!

So while making the vidcast, Atul and I talked about the areas of concern and he came up with an interesting solution prototype. Essentially, he took the idea of the form and put it INSIDE the actual project (this is using Thimble as an example). So check it out:

Here is a popcorn project "diy recipe" being made, using Thimble- although this process could be used to make any kind of project (Thimble and Popcorn included). The difference is that if it's a Thimble project, the project page needs to link to the Thimble project... because the project page contains the metadata for the Thimble project. If you take on look on the left panel, you are coding in all of the form fields.... which you then click publish and get: 

You see? It's a thimble page, crazy. Obviously- a bunch more work needs to go into this and we still need to resolve the majority of the questions that my vidcast posed, but I think that it's starting to get us moving into a good direction with some creative solutions.