Erlend Sogge Heggen

@Jason: This is an awesome topic.

@Chris: Great idea. This got me thinking about Matt Mullenweg's musings about "<a href="http://ma.tt/2009/08/starting-a-bank/">Starting a [simple] bank</a>, which led him to discover <a href="https://banksimple.com/">BankSimple</a>. I'd keep an eye on this startup if I were you.

I think "Be Open" fails to communicate the type of engagement sought for. Something should definitely be done about the navigation though.

Come to think of it, the entire top-most menu could do with a little restructuring. There's a lot of overlap. I would prefer something like:

About
- The open source way
- OpenSource.org

Participate
- Should Be (i.e. Note Board)
- Writing*
- Mailinglist

Contact Us (... because I think the contact us link should be more prominent)

The sub-elements could appear as drop-downs, but most importantly they should show up in the right sidebar as a collection of pages.

*Writing ought to be its own topic, instead of merged into the index of 'Participate'. This is because there's a process tied to it; it's not just "speak your mind".

There there's the matter of the "Participate" sidebar block currently in use on the site. First of all, the contents of these blocks are almost entirely specific to "Writing", so I think the block should be specific to that space. A simple "write for us!" in a prominent position on the site would be enough to draw attention to the key topic.

Furthermore, there's some confusing inconsistency going on. In this commenting view I seem to have a tabbed block of "Most popular", "The latest" and "Participate" available to me. Naturally, the "Participate" tab is superfluous because right above it there's another one much like it:
http://i.imgur.com/GBpUj.png

There's more to say but this comment already exceeds the unspoken tl;dr limit by two lengths.