We’ve just launched community.openatrium.com, a new hub for the Open Atrium community. From the day we released Open Atrium, we knew that we’d need a proper place for users and developers to go to collaborate. Until now, we’ve been using the issue tracker and wiki features on GitHub, but we decided it was time to eat our own dog food. Yep, the new community.openatrium.com site is powered by Open Atrium.

This new site is designed to address two fundamental needs that our community has. First, we need documentation so people can learn what Open Atrium does and how they can use it. In line with this, we also need help writing that documentation. On the community site there’s a collaborative space that we hope meets this need. It’s a place where the Open Atrium community can come together to create documentation, and community administrators can help moderate, highlight, and curate the content to make sure that it serves the entire Open Atrium user base to the fullest extent possible. Currently we have an English language documentation group, and we plan to start sets of documentation in more langauges with the community as well.

We’re lucky to be launching a site that already has a significant amount of content. That’s thanks to an Open Atrium documentation and translation sprint that the folks from Krimson hosted a few weeks back. The sprint was very successful, and we’ve added the very solid documentation generated there to the site.

Our second big need is for a fast issue tracker, and the new community site has a group dedicated to tracking and resolving issues that the community finds. Since Open Atrium launched, we’ve had hundreds of issues posted back to us, and it’s been a real challenge for us to manage all those issues on GitHub. We’ve also heard back from people submitting issues that the process wasn’t as easy as it should be. We hope that the case tracker on the new site resolves both of these problems.

Young (yhahn) and Matt (ultimateboy) have done a great job pulling the site together. We have a great theme for it and have migrated all of the issues and comments from the GitHub issue tracker. We’ve also tried to notify people with accounts on GitHub (whose email address we could access) with details about accessing the new site (Sorry if we missed you!).

It’s always a little tricky to make changes to community infrastructure, but we’re sure that this will be worth it. This move will give us better tools and a chance to make Open Atrium even better. See you at community.openatrium.com.