This blog now moved
This blog has now been moved to the new Transition Network website, as ‘Ed Mitchell blog‘
See you over there 
Site launch dates
Here’s the final deadlines for action around the new site launch. For a more ‘facilitation-y’ outline of what phases we are going through post-launch, read the high level website launch update.
Wed 17/2:
Soft launch: read only beta: no-one invited in. All login/register options point to a holding page while we tinker live, move URLs, DNSs and other technical things with three letter acronyms, and find things we couldn’t foresee.
People are welcome to come and read and get in contact using the contact form, help us spot bugs!
Monday 22/2:
Soft launch: invite only beta: only some people invited in. All login/register options still point to a holding page
Ed will send invites to initiative profile admins/editors and project profile admins/editors to come in and tinker with the profile pages while it’s calm and we can concentrate on a limited number of users.
Monday 01/03:
Full launch: all welcomed with open arms, login/register options open and functioning
Ed will send invites to all users registered on system.
Let Spring be initiated with the arrival of our long awaited virtual blossom
Flower in February
Administrating the official process
This is for TN staff really, it’s a little geeky Information Systems and workflow post. Before the new site, when initiatives wanted to become ‘official’, there was quite a paper chase involving Word documents, emails, wikis, telephones, national hubs and other things.
For this project we reviewed the ‘official-isation process‘ and decided it was an important workflow for the platform. (The ‘platform’ supports a range of ’services’ and ‘workflows’).
It is now possible for initiatives to add themselves as mullers, fill out their initiative profiles and apply to become ‘official’ all in the system. We haven’t tested it yet, but it’s looking good.
Of particular excitement this morning is a tiny bit of logic to show admins what number the initiative should be:
click save to make official
Now I don’t know about you, but this is swwwweeeeeet!
Website Information Architecture
Work done by Ben and Ed, with input from the Network crew. It’s never firm, everything changes, but here’s our working model for launch. Any suggestions?
Of particular discussion in the network office is the use of the word ‘initiative’ for a primary navigation (at the top). It’s about information relating to the Transition Towns movement/community/initiatives.. we’re a bit stuck!
Transition Network website IA
Here it is in text format:
Transition Network website Information Architecture V1
04/02/10: Totnes
**NB** Edited 09/02 to reflect further discussions:
Design V3
It really doesn’t do Laura’s work justice, just taking a screengrab.
Her design goes all the way through the system, re-skinning the administration functions for users, tweaking out drupal standard elements (“… remove that clutter, sigh, mutter, mutter…”), including print versions of pages within the css, considering third level navigation within the community microsites for different user types, putting lots of design elements in the css in order to make the pages lighter and therefore more energy effiicient on the server etc. etc.
Either way, we’re in serious motion now – as said before, simple, clean, usable, elegant:
Users and roles
That’s right folks, we’re using the word ‘user’. We love you dearly and know that you are humans with hearts and souls, but the word is so useful that we can’t avoid it. Just to prove it, here’s a photo of one (representing his local TT initiative at a Bristol street fayre):
Dan from TT Montpelier with his 'wish tree'
So now we’ve got that out the way, here’s our view on the different users and their related roles in our system. Dan will be a ‘primary point of contact’ and ‘Initiative Profile admin’ (not that he knows that yet)…
Anyone spots anything amiss, let us know and we’ll be very grateful – here’s a direct cc from our workspace:
Note: (You all know this, but I’m guessing many users of the site don’t…) Roles, like the permisions they wrap up, are cumulative. This means that users should be given the right combination of roles to do the job. For example, the Administrator role does NOT need to write newsletters or develop the site, so if an Administrator needs those facilities, they get given the ‘Newsletter Writer’ and ‘Developer’ roles as appropriate – rather than bloating and complicating the Administrator role. This is Jim Kirkpatrick’s work…
Internationalisation
We’ve had a few enquiries about managing multiple languages on the new web platform. Here’s a starter for ten:
We are launching the site in English to start with. Once we have ‘bedded’ the site in, and are happy the many workflows and processes are in place, we will launch the conversation on how best to approach multiple languages. This will require a group of discussers. We do not want to rush into anything short term that a long term plan would de-value.
One of the benefits of using drupal (our software framework) is that it has good hooks for multiple languages in all the layers of the site. We have thus ensured that all our ‘content types’ (profile pages, blog posts, user profiles etc.) can be multi-lingual-enabled so that, technically-wise, we are capable of adopting new languages as and when an ‘international’ group works out the best way to proceed.
This will involve work however – technical and linguisitic – which will need the support of a group.
We are also working in an open source environment with all the required technical processes in place, so that important technology like this can be delivered by the people who need it the most and know the most about it.
The Sharing Engine
This is a quick outline of how ‘The Sharing Engine’ should pan out.
What is The Sharing Engine?
The Sharing Engine is a ‘feed aggregation’ tool which will enable us to listen to and re-publish news of different types from around the web. If you want to see one in action, have a look at one of our friends who has one about Permaculture. There are a few types of news which you might imagine as ’streams’ of continuously updated information:
‘Movement news’:
Transition Initiative post news on their websites all over the web. We will aggregate these news posts on the TT web platform. This will enable anyone to see news from around the movement without having to go to all their different websites, and without having to ask all the different initiatives to add their news to a central website.
As well as this, the Sharing Engine will also publish a ‘feed’ of this ‘movement news’ so that anyone can subscribe to it and not even come to the TN website to get the latest movement news. They can also re-publish this movement news feed on their own sites; making our technical model ‘distributed’ – ie not ‘centralised’.
Our aim is for wider and wider de-centralisation in the long term to reflect the bottom up nature of TT.
‘Partner news’ and ‘Transition Voices’:
As well as the ‘movement news’, we hope to aggregate posts from ‘partners’ (who are respected authors or organisations in the field). This will be ‘partner news’.
From this stream, the editors will select individual posts to be ‘transition voices’. Transition Voices is an extension of the amazing work Rob has been doing on Transition Culture – an exploration into what is Transition.
How does it work?
It is driven by RSS feeds.
In order for it to work we need to know where initiatives’ news feeds are: the URL. We hope to gather this information when initiatives edit their Initiative Profile pages in phase one of the ‘adoption phases’ – read a high level outline of the adoption phases.
What is the long term plan for the Sharing Engine?
Adoption phases following website launch
This is a pretty ‘workflow-y’ post to provide the basics of the three ‘adoption’ phases we envisage following the launch of the website. It’s quite long as there is a lot to say! Getting a website online is one thing; having people use it is another.
The community nature of the Transition Network web platform means that it will only ’succeed’ (beyond being a news site) if the movement adopt it as their own. So it’s a gamble that there is enough value in the service to encourage transitioners to use it.
This is an old, old, online community management challenge, and one we are really looking forward to experiencing; everyone says that they want a community site – the question is – once we’ve launched it, and call out to transitioners to adopt it, will we all make the effort to make it a valuable community asset by adding our details?
Departures board in a Star Wars style
We have identified three key phases to gradually introduce transitioners to the new and lovely site. The phases start with the vital but relatively simple bit where we update our initiative profile pages, and gradually get more interesting…
We are relatively easy about timings; we won’t move from one phase to another until we are happy that it’s OK; it’s a community project, not a corporate marketing gig. And please excuse the word ‘user’; it’s a useful technical term and, really, reflects that we are all ‘using’ the service.
Three ‘phases’:
- Pre-launch communications (phase 0)
- Pre-launch warm up mail to all official points of contact
- Initiative and User Profile adoption (phase 1: February)
- Post-launch welcome email to official points of contact
- Post-launch welcome email to all registered users
- Mullers adding themselves to directory (phase 2: late February/early March all things going well)
- Welcome email to all mullers (scraped off the google maps)
- Community Microsites (phase 3: late March, early April all things going well)
- Gentle approach to beta-testers from EM’s list of likely people
- Beta-testing activity
- Wider opening up to all wiki users
Design layer V1
Laura’s first run on the interface (ie this is the basic scaffolding for the design).
Here the news page:
TT website design theme V1
As she says
“It’s very grey at present – before you all faint in horror… – there is a reason for this – it’s mainly to mark out some of the block/sidebar type regions and so I can test full functionality before adding all the pretty bits over the coming days. If we’re happy with the general framework and regions* (*see below on explanation of regions so far) I can take feedback and move forward with the more graphical elements and custom areas of the site, thus removing grey css overload…”
Now that is what we call design – not just interface, a fully layered approach to the interactions the site aims to afford. And of course it’s clean, simple, flexible, handy to use, easy to read, easy to administer…
