Erlend Sogge Heggen

Are you talking about a change beyond the name? E.g. different/newer types of content in this space and more focus on user engagement, be it through new features or greater visibility. Or is it just a subtle change of label?

Looking at the content over the past few months, I would roughly separate it into "site improvements" and "polls". The former simply notifies visitors of a site change, the latter asks for an opinion, usually in the form of a vote. They're so different that I find it hard to come up with any suitable term to unify the two.

So I'll stretch the original topic a little and discuss the "should-be" contents. I think the site updates are great, while the polls usually don't hit their mark, as you can tell by the average amount of votes and comments. Please don't take offense, but it just doesn't seem like this is what the opensource.com visitors are here for. The engagement level of this website isn't powered by it's functionality (e.g. in contrast to some forum-centric sites), but rather by its contents. We tend to care about how we interact with this website's contents, and I think that is the type of engagement you should be investing the bulk of your efforts into.

I really like the ring of the "Incubator"; I think most people have positive connotations to that, much like the "labs" sections we see in many sites these days. However I think that label would demand a shift in content that isn't going to happen just yet.

How about the "Note Board"? I'm looking at <a href="http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/1380760/2/istockphoto_1380760-note-board.jpg">this picture</a> and I'm thinking "yeah, that's pretty much what it's like right now. You check by here once in a while to see 'the latest' and you get a chance to stick your own little note on there if you so please". Right now I think that level of engagement at this site is fine. For something else (read: more) I think that would require a redraft of the website agenda. Actually I think I'll start a discussion about exactly that in the mailing list, which, ironically, will address the pitfall of mailing lists.

Another observation of mine, heh. I'm just wondering, will "Subject:" for comments remain mandatory? I personally find them rather redundant sometimes, wasting minutes trying to come up with an appropriate title for my single-paragraph comment. Both the current and previewed design for the comment blocks is rather dependent on titles to look right though.

I don't know if it's possible, but if the author+badges could be moved slightly upwards to restore the balance with the avatar aligned on the left, it might look okay:
http://i.imgur.com/k7hkf.jpg