After focus groups with community members, an enhanced user interface and a huge amount of coding (and coffee!), we at the Jordan Open Source Association are glad to announce our new website (available at https://jordanopensource.org), but its enhancement and development is still an ongoing process, and you can support it.

We are somehow proud -we should admit that- that our new website was not made in an ordinary-not-so-open way, as an organization calling for the adoption of open source methodologies we have tried our best to make the whole development process collaborative, open and transparent. So, how does our new website differ from others?
 

1- It is Open Source

We are hosting all the code of our website on our Github repo under an Apache-2.0 License. What does that mean? You can read how it works and how the different functions were implemented, you can also reuse our code without restrictions!

It’s also an open invite for you to contribute, feel free to open issues if you find any bugs or if you want to suggest enhancements. If you have some coding skills, remember that the code is open source, you can clone the repo, do your changes and feel free to open a pull request.

 

2- Not only the code, its content is open source

It is not only code! All the content on our website is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-ShareAlike license, this is a license that allows you to use and reuse our content. You are given permission to do that.

At JOSA we are proud to be an organizational member of the Creative Commons network, we have advocated for CC licenses and copyright reform since our establishment in 2011, and since then our website provides content that is accessible and reusable without any copyright restrictions.

 

3- It’s made with cutting edge Open Source technologies

We did not want only our code and content to be open, we made sure that all the tools, technologies and infrastructure are open too! We are mentioning some here:

  • Jamstack: Well, the Jamstack is not a technology per se, but it's considered an innovative way of building websites and apps based on Javascript that delivers better performance, higher security, lower cost of scaling, and a better developer experience. 

  • Vue and Nuxt.JS: NuxtJS is an open source framework to build Vue applications, we are happy that we have leveraged NuxtJS in having cutting-edge and modern web development principles applied to our website, including modularity, server-side rendering and static generation.

  • Strapi: Strapi is a new, but promising, NodeJS-based open source Content Management System (CMS), currently used by organizations like IBM and NASA. The amazing thing about Strapi is that it’s headless and created to design Restful APIs fast, and manage content easily.

  • Docker: Our CI/CD practices are based on Docker containers, we also use Vercel (https://vercel.com) integrated with our Github repo, to deploy the website on a multiregional edge network.

But our use of open source tools is not limited to web infrastructure and code. Have you seen all these JOSA bots illustrations? They are made with the open source vector graphic software Inkscape and stored as SVG files.

 

4- It is privacy-friendly (We have a .onion hidden service)

At JOSA we care about privacy, this is why we prefer the use of open source (self-hosted) tools rather than rely on companies that gain profits from the processing of your personal information. Rather than using Google Analytics, we are currently using Open Web Analytics (OWA). In addition, we also created a tool to fetch data from external APIs without loading client-side trackers, this allows us to display content from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram without having trackers from these services loaded on your browser.

If you are a Tor Browser user, you will be happy to know that we are providing our website as a .onion hidden service for additional privacy and anonymity. You can access it from http://josavtlxyxjgeqbo.onion or, alternatively, as we have developed one of the recent features available starting Tor Browser version 11, if you will access our clear website you will be informed of our .onion service from the address bar.

 

5- It is yours!

The website has been designed having our community in mind, allowing better ways to interact and benefit from it, and now there are multiple ways you can make this website better.

  • Suggest: Do you have a feature you want to be included in our website? Do you think there is anything missing? Let us know! open an issue on our Github repo suggesting what you want.

  • Test: We know our website is not perfect, actually there is already a list of bugs our community is working on. Do you have an eye that can catch bugs from miles away? Open an issue on our Github repo, and let us know how we can make our website better.

  • Develop:  If you are good at coding, this is the opportunity to flex your muscles (or brain cells). Pick any issue, clone the repo and do your magic! Create a pull request and get some love from us! You are not familiar with the languages we use? Don’t worry, this is the perfect opportunity to learn brand new technologies used for web development, and we are here to help.

  • Content: Do you have good writing skills? There are many ways to contribute. Suggest editorial changes on our website through opening issues on Github. We also have a community blog, in which members write about their opinions on topics of interest of our community, you can contribute with a blog post by sending us an email to: editor@jordanopensource.org

Yet not sure how to contribute? Join our Orientation Session this Saturday. We are going to guide you, and if this is the first time you contribute, that’s even better, there are ‘good first issues’ just for you.