The challenge is taking this sea of information (something that is inherently large and complex) and attenuating it until it is easily digestible chimes rather well with much of what we have been discussing in our newly materialised department The Institute for Educational Cybernetics here at Bolton. By taking a modular approach to digesting the information produced by and about a project I’m envisaging “boiling it all down” to a series of activity indicators showing (for example) that a given project has made a high number of commits to it’s SVN repository over the last month, relative of course to how many commits all the other projects have made. Other metrics would include a buzz-o-meter to measure general web activity referring to the project (sourced from places such as Technorati and Delicious).

In terms of the project itself it’s going to be done in a rapid and sensible kind of way with regular monthly milestones for new functionality! There is a bit of a discussion going on about platforms (rails or php? I’m desperate to learn rails and this will be a good opportunity! On the other hand I code php in my sleep…)

PROD itself! (prod.cetis.org.uk)

Trac instance (trac.cetis.org.uk/trac.cgi/prod)
Including mockups, milestones, wikiness, tickets and all manner of trac goodness

There are a few processes going on; Mark, Sharon and Adam have been conducting a review of the community wiki aspects of the web presence and the e-learning focus team are considering where to go next with their magazine-style site with a view to merging it together with the JISC-CETIS page. The Communications team has been discussing the whole show from start to finish and back again.

My thoughts

1) You are in a twisty turny maze

There is a tendancy for people to get lost in the site. Removing some navigational elements (especially in the wiki) and applying some others (breadcrumbs, menus etc) in a coherent way will make a difference I hope – but the main proposal is as follows:

Merge the www.cetis page, the jisc.cetis page and the elearning focus site into one coherent magaziney all-singing portal.

Front page mockup v3

(old versions: v1 v2)

The mockup (v3) shows the main elements we have identified – with a monthly editorial, regularly changing “features”, and constantly changing “news”. It also gives prominence to the SIGs with a prominent bar on the left hand side…

To start off with, the news and features would actually be drawn from the blogs as the current aggregation is – only the editiorial process will be stepped up – with lead-ins and article filtering-selection done by the focus team. As is done with e-learning focus, articles may also be commissioned by external writers.

V2 has a horizontal-slice approach; Banners | Navigation | Editorial | News etc (3 streams) | Other stuff (4 streams)

V1 is an earlier attempt – and is more like the aggregation as it stands at the moment.

2) Re-work the SIG entry points

We made a decision quite early on that the SIGs would simply have a protected wiki page each to serve as their main site – giving them total flexibility to do whatever they wanted. Of course this approach led to inconsistency and an extra learning curve for staff. The result was certainly not easy to follow for the outside observer and generally quite unsatisfactory to my mind.

sig-page.pdf
I have in fact started working on it

So the plan would be coherent entry points combining the main details of the sig, good quality linkage with the events system and drawing in content from the main aggregation and wiki (by tag naturally). Crucially the co-ordinators need customisable space to do with what they wish whether it be posting up some powerpoints or pointing to some interesting resources online somewhere – I need another pass of Mark and Sharon’s work as well as a round of discussion with co-ordinators to figure out exactly what really needs to be done.

3) The project tracker

Already discussed somewhat in my post about doap and ohloh I have a chunk of time set aside for re-working the project tracking system so we can reliably keep tabs on what is going on with JISC projects. Again this needs to be nicely integrated.

Example Project page

One last thing

There is one last thing. I propose removing all traces of rounded corners in favour of the infinitely superior square corners. Trendy design at it’s best don’t you think