Overhaul team page

[WillieCubed]

Overview

Right now, the team page is merely passable in its purpose of displaying the current officers. However, it is nowhere near a final product.

Some information is needed ASAP to make the page more appealing to sponsors and potential passersby:

• Cropping officer images to squares to display a non-squished image of each officer
• Ensure all officers have a non-default biography
• Asking officers to provide social links (like LinkedIn, Instagram, personal websites)

In addition, some structural changes would be ideal for aesthetic and functional purposes:

• Separating officers into their respective committees. Right now, officer titles are displayed, but officer cards themselves aren't sorted.
• As a corollary, having some other internal mechanism for sorting officers. Right now, they're loaded purely based on spreadsheet order, which isn't ideal from a maintainability perspective.
• Perhaps having a list of past officers on the page, albeit in a de-emphasized form (perhaps as a simple list as opposed to being prominent cards
• Tweaking the column spacing/padding to look visually pleasing across larger screen sizes

Bigger Ideas

Ideally, clicking/tapping an officer card would open something akin to a "team member page" where someone could have more than just a sentence to describe who they are as an individual. In addition, we could possibly adopt as an idea on the larger acmutd.co website for individual division pages, having a list of officers for each, something like an ACM Officer Profile built into the organization-wide portal. @jafrilli, what do you think about this?

In line with the culture of HackUTD and ACM at large (as of the fall 2020 marketing ad), this team page would reaffirm ACM's brand as being people-focused - not just treating officers as a bunch of faces who happen to organize events and build projects, but allowing them some amount of expression as to why they're a HackUTD officer and who they are as people. This could give allow officers to establish some sort of legacy during their time in the organization that persists well after they graduate.

cc @harshasrikara @darichey @jafrilli @acmutd/dev-officers

[harshasrikara]

We do intend to have a full fledged "profile" page for the ACM Website. Users can login, add their own social media links, resumes and more directly without having a developer as a middle-man. The back-end code for this is already setup to create user profiles & have collections to store officer information for divisions and much more.

[WillieCubed]

Well, that makes HackUTD job's easier! Will the static site generator for the HackUTD website will be able to use this officer information as via API? Also, I'm wondering how this will work with static site generation as changes won't be propagated in real-time (that's the current and desired architecture for the site). Are there webhooks that can be triggered when officers update their information?

[harshasrikara]

Its possible to have changes propogate in real-time even with a static website on gitpages. Firestore client libraries for web allow for realtime listeners to connect directly, its quite amazing. Although tbh im not sure real time is quite necessary because the changes are going to be few and far between. An alternative option is to just have an apicall run onpage load to retrieve relevant information. I'm not sure that this is always a viable option because the ACM Api is secured to only allow authenticated requests to pass through but perhaps we can make an exception for requests originating from www.hackutd.co. Lots of options to explore.