II. History of Web Planning Process
The Evergreen Web Planning Team began work in late summer 2010. The Team is composed of self-selected members of the Evergreen Communications Committee along with other interested members of the greater community, and was led by an external facilitator familiar with open source software communities and online collaboration platforms.
From the beginning of the web planning process, Web Planning Team members were committed to transparency and inclusiveness. Progress updates were regularly published to the Evergreen general email list and numerous rounds of community input were solicited from various stakeholder groups. In addition, the Team reached out to the current website builders and maintainers to gather their important input.
As noted below, the Web Planning Team utilized a planning technique borrowed from the agile software development community called “user stories.” A thorough analysis of various website user groups was conducted, followed by the creation of brief, plain-English narratives describing how a future website would ideally be used (the “stories”). Again, the Web Planning Team solicited feedback from the general community multiple times during this phase of the planning.
Although the initial - and primary - focus of the Web Planning Team was to consider a major website/platform overhaul in the mid-term future, it was determined that some of the requested enhancements could be implemented on the existing website immediately. A sub-set of the Web Planning Team met separately to work on incremental improvements to the existing site while the rest of the team focused on the proposed future overhaul.