Leisa Reichelt is an independent user experience consultant who was originally hired by the Drupal Association along with Mark Boulton Design to work on the Drupal.org redesign and then by Acquia to work on the Drupal 7 User Experience project (D7UX).
The original Drupal.org redesign work was focused on the external experience of being able to communicate Drupal to other outsiders. But through her experiences of working within the Drupal community, she realized that there's a lot of stuff that is broken with the internal experience of collaborating on Drupal.org.
She gave a Core Conversation presentation at DrupalCon Chicago with Randy Fay titled "Redesigning the Drupal Issue Queue (Codename Prairie: a Social Architecture Project)."
First of all, she says that Drupal.org should be a social website, but nothing about it really feels social. There can be a very demanding tone that people use to other developers in the issue queues, and so she's really interested in different ways of bringing the humanity to the social interactions.
In her DrupalCon presentation, she presented a number of screenshots that draw inspiration from other popular Q&A sites like Quora and Stack Exchange, the Follower module of Twitter as well as from Open IDEO, which is a collaborative design site for social good. These sites all have innovative ways for surfacing relevant content, measuring participation, and tracking authority and expertise. She believes that the Drupal community should try to integrate some of these ideas in order to collaborate better and how to explore problems in a better way.
One illustrative example is to look at this drupal.org issue called "Redesign the issue queue," which in the end recommends people to track the latest action at the Prairie Group on g.d.o. as well as this d.o. wiki page.
Last week, Reichelt posted some preliminary wireframe ideas for the Drupal.org Issue Queue V2 to notable for people to comment on. She feels like this is a really interesting problem that has a lot of implications for many other distributed open source projects beyond just Drupal, and is excited to keep exploring these ideas with the engaged and passionate Drupal community.
