Drupal is growing in complexity and growing simply in sheer numbers. We need more tools to help people manage the information overload and find the best voices in our community quickly. We should build dynamic tools to empower community members to join in and share their voices (if those voices are valuable) rather than walled gardens that keep people out. I believe voting, richer profiles, and the hot content are steps to help enable that vision. That said, the implementation has to match the community values. Below I've laid out the story of how some improvements to Groups.Drupal.org were made, provide data behind some of those improvements, and ask some questions so we can keep refining them.
At Drupalcon San Francisco there was a sprint for groups.drupal.org features where Josh Koenig and Brian Gilbert helped out add some new features. In particular we added voting on nodes & comments and we added a "hot" page which incorporates several elements to determine which content on the site is interesting in the last week.
I wanted to look back on the past year to think about these changes and whether or not they are an improvement.
Hot Content: G.d.o is a differentiated piece of $#!@$&
