Dear Cochrane colleagues,
I hope by now you will have had a chance to look around the re-designed Community website, following our soft launch at the end of February. As we are still actively developing the site and integrating and creating content, I’d like to update you on plans for the next stage of work.

Responding to feedback
We’ve had lots of feedback over the last couple of weeks to let us know about bugs, fixes, requests for editing, missing information, and general comments. Thank you for all of it, and please continue to flag up anything you think we need to know about. We’re prioritizing responding to these, and most of them are relatively simple to fix or implement; we’ll let you know if any suggestion requires further review or discussion before it can be done.

Next stage of work
Now that post-launch feedback is slowing down, we’re planning out focused projects of work for the remainder of March and through the month of April. We’re running these projects as weeklong ‘sprints’, focusing on tasks such as moving manuals, developing portals, and integrating or creating content in specific sections of the site. We’ll be contacting key people individually in preparation for starting work on these sprints, but please feel free to get in touch if you’ve got questions about this process.

Editing access
In addition to the new look and feel of the Community site, it’s also operating on a new system – Drupal 8 – that we’re still learning how to use and build as we go. So we’re taking it slowly in opening up editing access until we’re confident that everything is stable. As we work through the sprints, we’ll start piloting editing access to key users a few at a time and then make decisions about more general access. In the meantime, we’ll continue to prioritize requests to edit and update pages to make sure they’re up to date.

Thanks again for your interest and input, and please let me know if there’s any aspect of this you’d like to discuss further.

Best
Nancy Owens, Senior Communications Manager, Communications and External Affairs