News items that are general JASIG related (i.e. annual conference announcements) and feature news items specific to JA-SIG projects (i.e. uPortal Training Available...)

I am skeptical of a need for automatic aggregation from events from other sites. If editing and entering news items is easy enough or well-managed enough, this might be implemented by specific, site-appropriate versions of these news items from elsewhere being included in the news on a particular site. I favor targeted, well-crafted communication rather than syndication of generic communication and suggest that an automatic aggregation requirement is partially a phantom requirement, deriving from the very poor experience we've had with news in HyperContent.

Once one has heroically gotten any of the sites to manage to include a news item, one wishes the other sites would automatically syndicate it, since it's not cheap, easy, or fun to go manually enter it in the next site. If it were cheap, easy, and fun to enter news items, and to even edit them to be audience-appropriate, then it may become very possible to put a uportal-flavored version of a generic conference announcement on the uportal.org site and a more general version of that announcement on ja-sig.org, rather than feeling the need to present identical news items in multiple places. Likewise, a uPortal release announcement on uportal.org might assume one already knows what uPortal is and focus on what makes the new release different, whereas a uPortal release announcement on ja-sig.org might focus less on the details and more on what uPortal is and the general message of project release progress.

So yes, absolutely, generic and specific news items are a requirement, but I wouldn't want to presume some particular automation need.

I think the content for these pages is the same as Jonathan outlined for the jasig.org site - i.e., identity, brand, information, marketing, communication outside JASIG, easy answers to FAQ. 

Also, if the intended audience is users/potential users, maybe something about "Why uPortal?"  What are the benefits that implementing institutions have had - so that someone contemplating implementation can understand why they might want to do utilize uPortal?  Are there some "best practices/best usages" out there that might spur "potential use" thoughts among those who visit the web page?

Finally, the look/design really needs to be very user friendly and easy to navigate.  If a potential user's first impression is that the Web site is difficult, they may infer the same about uPortal and not pursue it.  (The old adage you never get a second chance to make a first impression.)

A few comments regarding the JASIG site:

• Does the JASIG Activities section contain the list of projects (e.g., uPortal)? I assume so. If not, we need to prominently list the projects.
• The site should highlight the ideal of Community Open Source or Higher Education Open Source or whatever we want to call this collection of communities. We started to coordinate and coalesce as the St Paul conference and we should keep this momentum going. We should help spread the notion that there are a number of projects/communities like ours and we are all in this together. It starts to look like a movement and will help potential adopters see that Open Source in Higher Education is real.
• We should have an area of the site targeting CIOs and decision makers that would include
  • case studies
  • quote(s) from peer CIOs
  • benefits of using Open Source
  • Value of membership

A few comments regarding the uPortal site:

• The site should have some type of optional self-registration. This would give us contact information we could use to follow up with.
• The site should have a list of implemented sites. This would need to be easily updated. It could simply be the wiki page of implementations, but it might be nice to have a form that would allow someone to easily add themselves.
• We will have to make it easy to locate the CIO section of the JASIG site so we don't need to replicate it here.