Add board member and other org info to About page

[Mark-LaCroix]

The About page should include current and past board members, information on the board member election process (once finalized) and other dry, authoritative organizational details such as technical non-profit status, IGDA parent org details, etc.

I do not know if we need full bios or portraits of board members. An argument against is that it's work to create and maintain, but an argument for is that it might be useful for members to see that info, for current board members at least. Otherwise, a website, Twitter, or email contact link might suffice.

[mgrider]

I could go either way on this. Do not feel strongly.

[cadomac]

This is something that could be handled via JSON quite easily, so you only have to update one file and add/remove photos. The front-end iteration would just consume the JSON and spit out the formatted stuff.

[Mark-LaCroix]

I assume we all agree that board member information should be on the site, but that no one has a strong opinion about how much information we need to include for each?

[mgrider]

It's definitely work to maintain the list. I could go either way on including a list of board members at all. I can see benefit, because it (ideally) would make us more accessible, or at the very least give some context when people are like "who runs this thing?", but on the other hand, it's just one more thing to go stale after it hasn't been updated for a while.

[mgrider]

This is something that could be handled via JSON quite easily, so you only have to update one file and add/remove photos. The front-end iteration would just consume the JSON and spit out the formatted stuff.

Just a quick comment here, but I wonder if I should formalize this somewhere (like in a style guide or something?): I definitely want to prefer markdown to other content formats unless there is some reason to do otherwise.

I guess thinking about this a tiny bit more, if we made the list of board members a data object (json or yaml or whatever), then we could include the dates of their posting in the data, and have them automatically move into the list of "former board members" when appropriate. 😂 (I'm struggling to see another reason for making this JSON as opposed to just markdown.)

[cadomac]

(I'm struggling to see another reason for making this JSON as opposed to just markdown.)

I mean you're technically using both. The idea is that the JSON would provide the data and we'd have a markdown template that would just pull that data from the JSON and generate the board member cards/rows/whatever. But doing it that way ideally presents less work because you just need to update one file with data which is then automatically used to create the new page.

The JSON could be as simple as this:

{
    "board_members": [
        "cameron": {
            "bio": "...",
            "picture": "/path/to/picture.jpg",
            "fullName": "Cameron MacDonald"
        },
       "mark": {
            ...
       }
    ]
}

Then the template just iterates over the "board_members" array and spits out formatted sections. So you only need to update that array. I think it's important to display current board members. Yes, it could go stale, but that's on us then. It really shouldn't be too hard to update that once a year.

[mgrider]

I definitely prefer yaml to json if we are going to use a data format. (So much less messy!)

But again, if it's just static content, I definitely think we should prefer markdown, which means anyone can read and write it, making it just that much easier to maintain for non-developers.

[DavidMann10k]

I don't think this is cause for getting too fancy and involving data files and templating. It's data that will change very infrequently.

If you did, though, the way you would do it is documented here: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/datafiles/

They actually have an example of rendering a list of "members".

I wouldn't be upset if it were done this way. But if it's me doing the work I'd just create a static page.

[DavidMann10k]

I assume we all agree that board member information should be on the site, but that no one has a strong opinion about how much information we need to include for each?

Definitely. I think it should be brief. Name, picture, paragraph with relevant biographical info.

[DavidMann10k]

I think this is resolved by the redesign. We have pictures, names, and links.