The portal is the central location for all of the content that you came up with in your plan. The guide here will provide steps and a template to make this easy for you!
When the us-rse first started, it had created a Slack channel along with a GitHub organization to serve the main website. As a new RSE in the community with an institution that I (@vsoch) wanted to bring in, I decided to create a community template that could easily be populated by an institution. Since USRSE on GitHub does not support general open source projects, these repos now live with the rseng organization. Now, this portal is available to you to start growing your community.
The portal, in and of itself, isn't going to build community. However, by writing content there for your users, creating guides for best practices, and steps to get support, the portal helps to establish your group.
The details of setup can be found in the README of the respository, and the overall steps are outlined here:
- Each interested member of your group can add a personal page that is indexed for search.
- If your group has a Twitter feed, it can be added to the site's main page.
- You can write an "About" page, and a "Support" page that describes what you offer (also indexed).
- If you choose, you can write posts that will appear in the site's feed.
By default, the portal is branded to match a simple rseng pages design by @vsoch that is used for rse-stories. If you want to take extra steps to tweak the theme of the template, this would strengthen the branding for your particular institution.
Make sure to include enough methods of contact on the portal so that if a user or interested RSE visits, they know how to contact you. By default, if you add an email address, a contact page is automatically generated to send an email using formspree. Other social media links like Twitter and GitHub are good to include, also provided with the template.
Content is the most important part! It should include most of what you decided in your plan.
Next, read about communication to find other RSEs at your institution.