Archive for the ‘technology’ Category
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?
Features
For those of you with an interest in technical design and what goes on under the bonnet of a web project, I thought I’d share some of our documentation.
This is copied out of work done by Jim Kirkpatrick, one of the two key developers, from the Transition Technologist shared workspace and is not complete, but it’s stonking good stuff and thought you might like it too.
Jim’s work follows the picture…
Eveything will be OK in the end
—> Jim’s work –>
17 Jan: News and Events features now updated to take account of the changes in content types. Contexts also added to aid theming and panels usage. Updating DEV and SVN late this eve.
Please peruse and comment at your leisure – Jim:
“Initiatives Directory” Feature
Only contains a set of views for now and replaces the original ‘Initiatives Directory’ view to add several improvements.
Views
“initiatives_directory” View
- Defaults – Return only published Initiative Profiles, sorted by date updated (newest first).
- Recently Updated block – Returns 5 most recently updated initiatives.
- Directory Page – As defaults but is a table view showing title, location, and status sorted by title and exposes Community Type filters and Status (Mulling/Official) as options to user. Also takes argument of first letter of initiative so that the directory tabs in special header I added allows a user to jump to all initiatives starting with, say, ‘A’.
- All Recent/Official Recent feeds – A feed listing the all the recent initiatives, or just those with ‘Official’ status.
- By Country Page – Returns all Initiatives for a given country code
Community microsites offer
The Community Microsites are very simple websites for TT initiatives who don’t or can’t have their own website but want to stay in touch with their members. They consist of editable pages (like the current wiki but better, a news blog, events diary, community newsletter, and simple membership management.
Here is a diagram outlining the Community Microsite offer:
Community Microsite Information Architecture
What will happen when?
Our first focus following the launch of the new Transition Network website will be to help initiatives update their Initiative Profile Page which appears in the Initiative Profile Directory. It’s impossible to predict but we hope that this will be fully moving by Mid-February.
Once that is done, we will be inviting a few initiatives to try out the Community Microsites before we invite all of the initiatives currently using the wiki to give them a go. As above, we are not in control of how people adopt the system, but hope that the early initiatives using the microsites could be trialling them by the end of February – so we can open them up proper in early Spring.
Technical status update
Happy 2010 all. Over Christmas, the Technologists have been busy in spite of children, flu, motoring calamities and even pleurisy so hats of to them! Here’s an update:
IT Works:
The Transition Network web project is an Open Source Project (as you might expect). We are using open source software with minimal customisation so that anyone with development experience can log in and maintain or enhance the platform in the future. This is important – the vast majority of web projects are very expensive and rely on central funding. We are a bottom up movement with no guaranteed funding, so the web project needs to be able to look after itself when our initial funding runs out (thanks funders!). Any specific work we do we will share back to the Drupal (software we are using) community (that’s just good practice).
In order to support this noble approach, we need to have an IT infrastructure that is accessible and safe. Separate servers are required (‘dev’ and ‘test’, and ‘live’), shared ‘code repositories’, shared workspaces, discussion groups, documentation, agreed processes and protocols.. it’s a community project in itself and needs sensitive and flexible IT.
Chris and Graham have set us up with all the IT kit we need. This is very important and should not be under-estimated.
Design Works:
All of the screengrabs you will see below are using a very very rough and simple design theme. Laura (our uber-designer) is waiting for us to get the foundations done before adding her signature ‘brilliant, simple and elegant’ design work underway. There is a lot to it – the main website needs styling, different page templates, ‘blocks’, directory views, profile pages, ’social functionality’, community microsite admin design etc.
She has years of experience of working with voluntary sector organisations and doing online community design (for humans not uber-technical types) so we’re really looking forward to this work, but we have to wait – so for now the design looks very simple.
Development site screengrab
And here is the development site with a little bit of a design layer on it:
Transition Network development site screengrab
Development site
Check it out!
We have a development site; isn’t it beautiful?
Transition Network development site screengrab
And we’re trialling our first data imports. It’s all a bit exciting to be honest.
This is what websites really look like without the nice design layers.
And this is very close to the ‘top’ of all the technology stack that supports it – the different bits of hardware required, the webserver software, mailserver software, development server software, code repositories, security layers, applications, business logic, data etc.
I will be writing more about the Transition Technologists as a social model to deliver sustainable technology solutions to organisations, and also about how they have set up a functioning open source development framework out of pure passion and spirit.
In the meantime, well done you Transition Technologists! We are in motion!
Who is using the TT wiki to host their websites
Since the dawn of Transition Network and its wiki, the Network has offered TT initiatives in the movement the use of some website pages on the wiki to get them online.
Part of the web project going forward is what sort of community websites we can offer to the initiatives for free, and what would cost. We would love to offer everyone a service more brilliant and suitable than Ning, but we don’t have hundreds of developers and support staff etc. so we have to be careful not to over-extend ourselves now only to find ourselves over-exposed later.
We’re aware that many people have put a lot of effort and time into using the current wiki so we need to work out how to move them onto the newer, more flexible, linked up, easier to use service without too much grief. (This is an absolutely classic problem when migrating between different technical platforms).
Banner on Wave March
So we’ve been analysing the use of the TT wiki by the official initiatives in order to get an idea of who is using what, and how.
There is a huge range of different usage patterns, from none at all to hundreds of pages.
Here is a rough breakdown:
- Active wiki users: more than 100 page use: 1
- Active wiki users: 11 – 100 pages: 16
- Active wiki users: 1 – 10 pages: 29
- Holding wiki users: 11 – 210 pages: 6
- Holding wiki users: 2 – 10 pages: 5
- Holding wiki users: 1 page: 38
- Empty wiki users: 23
- Direct link to own site: 134
- Cancelled: 1
Definitions and explanations:
- All data is drawn from the ‘official initiatives listing page‘ on the TT wiki and searches of pages on the server
- Attachments have not been analysed
- Active: not using own website – all web activity on the TT wiki
- Holding: using the TT wiki site in combination with own site
- Empty: awaiting content
I think it’s safe to say that this means we’ll need to approach different initiatives in different ways!
Modules and customisation
For the drupal fans among us, here follows a list of the modules and related customisation work that we’re going to use for our ‘pre-alpha’ skeleton site (work before Christmas).
The ‘pre-alpha’ phase is where we’re putting the core components of the site together to give us a framework/strawman that we can test, trial, use, kick the tyres of, run some use cases through, spot the obvious flaws, and generally discuss together.
Not doing this iterative style of development means that you are always discussing something which doesn’t exist, and that’s a big risk on many levels – we need to see what we’re working with and doing this means that we really can see the mechanics of the site in action.
John McGeechan and Jim Kirkpatrick (the two developers who have emerged as leads on this bit) have done a magnificent job of translating my web ’strategic-y’ brief into a shared definition of the details of the platform, then converting this into drupal speak, and then into a set of proposed drupal modules.
And here is our work in progress:
These modules are necessary to provide the core functionality of the system. Most decisions and module names are self-explanitory, but where they’re not I’ve added a little description.
