How can we represent the community better on this web site?
We are constantly thinking of ways to improve this web site. We know we still have some parts to finish – notably the publications. And we have been working on that for the last couple of weeks.
But the bit which has been bothering us is how to represent work in progress. We finally decided we would create two separate sections for publications and research. But we are not a traditional university type research organisation sitting for hours behind closed doors penning a new masterpiece. Most of our work involves close collaboration with others. And as webmeister Dirk pointed out, there is little opportunity for others to contribute to the site at the moment. Neither does the site sufficiently show off the work going on in the community.
So we are now working on a research zone for the site which will not only give access to our own work, but will highlight work by others. How will we do this? We are not quite sure. But it will feature feeds from Stephen Downes’ edublogger list, from Delicious, CiteULike, Slideshare and other social networking applications. We are looking at how we can use yahoo pipes to mash it all up.
And we are investigating how to migrate the site to WordPress MultiUser. With MU we can use the structured blogging forms developed for Freefolio to offer all those who have created an account on the site (with which you can do little at the moment) the opportunity to add content themselves. We are thinking about opening up a reviews section, recommended applications, an events section and more. OK – it is going to take a couple of days. But if you have any ideas on anything you would like to contribute to this web site please get in touch or better still just leave a comment. We especially would welcome ideas on how we can make the site more representative of the community at large.
Oh – one other thing. We manage the content through the categories. the list is getting horribly long. We should have probably split between categories for content management and used a keyword plug in to manage the kind of content. But it is a bit late for that. Does anyone know how we can manage the category list beeter? Can we split it in two? Are there any plug ins?
