See you over there

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

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!

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:

Ben Brangwyn
Ed Mitchell
Tiko Brangwyn
Transition Network team
Comments from blog (thanks Steve)
Other sources

(p) = Page
(v) = View

Navigation:

No indent underlined = Primary (top level)
- =  secondary (in dropdown)
– = tertiary (in sidebar)

Home
——–

About
——–
- Funding
– How we’re using the money (p)
– Funders (p)
– Support us (p)

- People
– Staff (p)
– Trustees (p with a view of staff from system)
– Volunteers (p)
– Transition Speakers (p with a view of speakers from system)
– Media Contacts (p with a view of media type from system)

- Partners

- Principles
– Who we are and what we do (p)
– What we’re not (p)
– Cheerful disclaimer (p)
– Governance

- Training
– Individuals and communities (p)
— related pages (p)
— training events calendar (events directory view: training)
– Organisations (p)

- Publications (p with a view of resources tagged publication)

Community
————–
- Initiatives (v)
– Community Microsites lead off individual initiative profile pages

- Projects (v)
- People (v)
- Forum (forum)
- National hubs (p)

- Support (p)
– What’s a Transition Initiative?
– How to get a core team together
– 12 steps and 7 buts
– Becoming official
– Researchers
– Conflict resolution
– Initiating in a self-organising field
– Funding protocol and guidelines
– Governance
– Conferences

News
——–
- Promoted news (and ‘voices’ promoted blogs)
- Network news
- Movement news (should this be ‘Initiative news?)
- Newsletters
- Blogs

Resources
————–
individual pages in a ‘directory style’

** TOP RIGHT HAND**

Help
——
- Community rules
- T&Cs
- Blog posts about facilitation support
- Accessibility and privacy
- Social web
- RSS
- Energy use and the web

Contact us
—————
- Configurable form
– Pilgrimage page

**THINGS WE CAN’T PLACE**

Media page
TN projects
- web
- diversity
- political hustings
- heart & soul
- economics

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:

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…

Normal User Roles (The General Public)
1) Anonymous Users (Unregistered)
Can:

• View content (not private stuff)
• Add comments to content types that allow it
• Download attachments
• Sign up to newsletter (anonymously, by email address only)

CANNOT:

• Get notifications (by group, content or author)

2) Pre-registered (Registered but not email validated)
This is LoginToboggan role to allow users to start using the site immediately rather than have to go to email verification first. These users can do what Anonymous users can, plus can:

• Create a User Profile
• Get notifications, follow users etc, join groups,

3 A) Registered Users (Email has been validated)
Can do what Pre-Registered users can, Additionally, they can:

• Create an Initiative or Project Profile
• Create News or Events for an Initiative Presence
• Create new Forum post
• Flag as ‘abuse’
• Upload/attach files

3 B) Initiative/Project Profile Admin/Editor (Set as author/editor of an a given Profile)
NOTE: This role doesn’t really exist, these users get their permissions over their own Initiative or Project Profiles by being the ‘author’ – or by being one of the users referenced by the ‘Initiative Profile editable by’ field. Such users MUST be fully registered and can do everything a registered user can plus:

• Edit ‘their’ Initiative or Project Profile
• Add/change users able to edit the profile

4) Editorial & Focused Administrative Roles (The Content Team)
These have a little more responsibility and can do what Registered users can, plus what is listed below:
4 A) Forum Admin (Forum host/moderator/admin)

• Moderate all forum activity (create/delete/edit ANY forum post)
• Administrate Forums (create/edit/remove forum containers and fora)

4 B) Events Partner (Partner event adder)

• Add Imported Events
• Edit their events

4 C) Community Microsite Admin (Initiative Presence or Workspace admin)

• Manage membership of the initiative
• Edit the Initiative Presence
• Manage/edit/delete all group content in within the Initiative Presence
• TODO import new members with firstname, lastname, email, standard password (and username auto-completes)
• TODO Set up new group admins

4 D) Newsletter Editor

• Can write, complile, manage and send newsletter
• Can build/manage NodeQueues of posts to be used in the newsletter (this functionality is not fully implemented yet, but most the bits are ready)

4 E) Site Editor (network staff or movement)

• Can generally edit/create/delete most content
• Do general content administration

5) Administrative Roles (The Website Gods)
Can do what Registered users can, plus what is listed:
5 A) Site Admininstrator (BB, EM)
Can do everything a Site Editor can

• Plus can do everything administrator should be able to including managing users and their permissions (I think only Developers need this power but have left it in for now)
• Edit the ‘Status’ flag for Initiative Profiles

CANNOT

• do ‘development’ type tasks, or access dangerous features like using PHP within nodes

5 B) Developer

• Can do developer tasks, rare settings changes, use PHP in sensitive areas and nothing more

5 C) Transition Admin = User 1
This is the user 1 account, has access/permission to do everything. Only people updating the site’s modules need to know about or use this user account. Presently only John, Ed and I have this password…

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.

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?

We will work through the following phases gradually, learning as we go. So this is not set in stone, more a guideline:

1. Sharing engine: V1: news focus: the aggregation unit behind aggregating and re-publishing on the site:
(a) movement news gleaned from initiative websites (we ask for feed links in the initiative profile page)
(b) movement news gleaned from our hosted ‘community microsites’
(c) ‘partner’ feeds: respected blogs we aggregate and re-publish as a continuous stream
(d) ‘transition voices’: individual blog posts from the partner feeds identified as ‘transition voice’ and promoted so on the site

2. Sharing engine: V2: events focus: aggregating events information from initiative websites and re-publishing on the site

3. Sharing engine: V3: projects focus: aggregating projects information from initiative websites and re-publishing on the site. also aiming to enable remote uploading to projects database from websites. This will require a lot of co-ordination between a group of advanced TT website owners and is a long term goal.

We are not ready to offer anything beyond Sharing Engine V1 for some time. The projects database will be up and running and we need to get that going centrally before any distributed activity. Sharing Engine V3 is a significant beast requiring Drupal 7 and a lot of social co-ordination and outcoming technical work (on our site and websites around the web participating), so that’s all ‘blue sky thinking’ at the moment.

That’s about it for now.

For those who made it to the bottom, here’s a picture of Elvis and Tilba the cats doing their impersonation of internet enabled data feeds:

Elvis and Tilba impersonating internet enabled data feeds

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

Initiative directory adoption:

From launch, all official initiatives will appear in the Initiative Directory with only initiative name and weblink (to either their site or the wiki page). All official points of contact for initiatives need to be gently nagged onsite to update their initiative profile page (more below). From launch the initiative map will look empty. We need to have a message saying ‘This map will get better as the initiatives add their locations to their initiative profile pages. If yours is not here, please get in touch with your core team and ask your ‘official point of contact’ to update the information’
If official point of contact has not updated Initiative Profile:

1. user clicks on initiative name link in Initiative Directory
2. user sees page with just the name and link and ‘This initiative has not yet updated their Initiative Profile Page. If it is yours, please get in touch with your core team and ask your ‘official point of contact’ to update the information’

If official point of contact has updated Initiative Profile:

1. user clicks on initiative name link in Initiative Directory
2. user sees page with all the data that the official point of contact has added including the ‘contact this initiative’ button

People directory adoption:
from launch, all appear with names only (firstname lastname) in directory view
If user has not updated profile:

• reader clicks on name link in directory
• reader sees page with just their name on it and ‘this person has not updated…’
• reader does not see ‘contact this person’ button

If user has updated profile:

• reader clicks on name link in directory
• reader sees page with the information that the user wants to be displayed including the ‘contact this person’ button

General user adoption: subscribers from TN newsletter database

1. user receive welcome email from ed and ben and transition techs from mailchimp (EM to perform cunning .csv mailmerge integrating their one-time login link into each mail if possible)
2. user reads email – includes one off password change link, link to blog post outlining actions – actions outlined as per steps below
3. user clicks on link to change password and confirm subscription
4. user lands on personal profile page admin and change password and update other details
5. user saves personal profile page and is re-directed to the public personal profile page
6. personal profile page updated
7. user receives confirmation email from system with text and links about managing personal profile

Official point of contact user adoption: pre-loaded users and initiative profiles
This is for the official points of contact who have admin rights to their Initiative Profile Page and can edit it… as per user adoption above until step 5, when:

1. user saves personal profile page and is re-directed to their public personal profile page
2. user receives personal profile email confirmation with text and links about managing profile
3. user searches for and proceeds to Initiative Profile Page admin and update details (minimum: country, postcode/zip)
4. save initiative profile page and be re-directed to the initiative public profile page with a map
5. user receives confirmation email from system with text and links about managing initiative profile
6. user advises other core team members to register themselves or update their pre-loaded profile information to show that they are related to the intitiative
7. given 6, user associates core team members to initiative

IF initiative point of contact asks for someone else to be initiative profile admin person:

1. site admin asks for their postcode and adds it to the initiative profile anyway
2. official point of contact (profile author) can add another registered user to the profile if they want, or..
3. site admin asks point of contact for other users email and firstname lastname
4. site admin adds new user to system if not already on the system
5. site admin edits previous official point of contact user’s profile to remove admin access to initiative profile admin page
6. site admin edits new user’s profile to enable them admin access to the initiative profile admin page

Nagging users to fill out their initiative profile pages:

Onsite: this will be a gentle reminder whenever they login. Users will be presented with this message until they have added at least a postcode for the initiative. If the user asks for ‘initiative profile admin’ role to be changed to another user, this message needs to switch to the right user.

On email: we will send out an initial welcome email to all registered official points of contact asking them to:

• Do the edit
• Point us to another user (doesn’t have to be registered yet, we can do that)
• At the very least, reply with a good postcode for their initiative

Community microsites adoption:

Given the success of users adopting the initiative profiles in phase 1, and mullers adding themselves with sucess in phase 2, we’ll move to phase 3: setting up the microsites

Community microsite users are likely to fall into the following types:

1. Light users (a few pages on wiki site currently)
2. Heavy users (up to hundreds of pages on wiki site currently)

• EM approach individual beta testers to trial the service
• EM sets up Community Microsite functionality
• EM support beta testers with set up
• Gather findings and lessons learnt and tips
• Widen to broader community

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…

Here the People Directory:
(search by name or by interest)

People directory screengrab