I met with Vish at UDS-N to discuss encouraging contributions to the One Hundred Paper Cuts project. The issues he raised demonstrate that the page design is not meeting the requirements we set in the Launchpad 3.0 UI designs. You will see a common layout in Launchpad pages where a wide narrative block is above two blocks.

The narrative blocks on a project page (and any Launchpad page using the same layout) must explain what the you are seeing and why it exists. This information is entirely dependant on the project owner.  One Hundred Paper Cuts does this very well. I can read that the project chooses 100 small bugs that can be fixed to improve the common Ubuntu user experience. The project summary says everything in one sentence. The projects description elaborates and explains the value.

The left block below the narrative provides information about who works with the project, and where is the code for the project. Some projects have information about the organisation that the project belongs too. In the case of One Hundred Paper Cuts, the information about "where" is missing and there is no way for Vish to provide it. This project does not have code, it organises work to fix the code in other projects. This is a legitimate use case. Launchpad does not require projects to have source code, but it does not let project owners state what it does as an alternative. I do not know how to solve this.

I would like to tell contributors that this project is affiliated with Ubuntu and User Experience, but Launchpad does not have a concept of project affiliation or tags. I would like to see similar projects that I could contribute to. There are no plans to provide this feature, but we are discussing what needs to be done to fix project groups which has overlapping issues. We may have an opportunity to build this feature next year.

The right block under the narrative is intended to be a call to action. Every page that uses this layout should using this block to encourage users to contribute. For distro series, this block shows the packages that need upstream information. For projects, this should summarise the planned work and what needs to be done. I see a fragment of the series and milestone time line, but it does not tell me what is being done.  The milestones names are not informative. The name implies that the milestones are a sequence, but the 10 milestones are worked concurrently. One Hundred Paper Cuts uses feature-directed milestones. Launchpad supports this work pattern, but the time line does not describe it. Vish could rename the milestone to reveal the theme of the feature, eg rename maverick-round-10-sc-metadata to software-centre-metadata.

Fixing the name is easy, but the information about the work will still not appear on this page. The project index page used to show a summary of the active milestones. I have pondered adding the current milestone to the page so that contributors can see what they can do right now...but how do I show 10 concurrent milestones? Pages that work with milestones are prone to timeouts. I cannot consider restoring milestone information until we solve the long python computation times needs to summarise them.

We can fix some of issues that the project index page has in the next few months, but I think some larger feature and design work is needed to really make the page work for all projects.