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Scientific Collaboration with Plone:
A Case StudySally Kleinfeldt
Plone Symposium East 2009
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Background
• Collaboration site for Advancing Green Chemistry
• Fall 2008 Jazkarta project
• Me? I’m an ecologist...
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Overview
• Organization
• Opportunity
• Solution
• Lessons
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Organization
• AdvancingGreenChemistry.org
• Mission: promote development and adoption of Green Chemistry
• Shift away from an economy dependent on toxic chemicals
• “...design molecules with an eye to consequences right from the start...”
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Opportunity
• Build collaborative connections between
• Green Chemistry
• Environmental Health Sciences
• Sciences that operate within strict disciplinary boundaries
• Common thread: how chemicals interact with biological systems
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Problem
• How to create collaboration where there is none? How to orchestrate joint:
• Conferences
• Papers
• Policy development
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Solution
• A private website that provides a safe, trusted environment for members to discuss ideas that might be controversial in mainstream venues
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Solution
• Website features:
• Invited members
• Relevant news, papers, bibliographies
• Wiki-like collaboration areas
• Discussion forums
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Plone Features Well Suited to Problem
• Secure document sharing
• Rich pages, news, events, calendars
• Wiki behavior
• Commenting
• Related content
• Member areas
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Add-on Products Provide The Rest
• Discussions (PloneBoard)
• Integrated news feeds (FeedFeeder)
• Bibliographiies (CMFBibliographyAT)
• Papers, summaries (Easy to create custom content types)
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The Site
• Home page with portlets for news, members, discussion posts, announcements
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Members
• Browse and search members
• Portlet for most active members (based on count of content)
• Portlet for most recent members
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Member Profiles
• Extra fields (projects, affiliations...)
• Member area preconfigured to contain bibliography and papers (custom type)
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The Science
• Primers on Green Chemistry and Environmental Health Sciences
• Summaries of papers (custom type)
• “Wiki” behavior on some sections
• Admin controls on sharing tab
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News
• Featured news items added to site
• Two RSS feeds imported with FeedFeeder so searchable on site
• To improve merged display without needing a custom view, Ross Patterson created collective.subcollectionview - provides new layout for sub-collections
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Discussions
• Implemented with PloneBoard
• Not much activity
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Ad Hoc Collaborations
• New area created during conference
• Notes, ideas, policy documents
• Responding to opportunity presented by new administration
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Results
• November conference - 30 invited experts
• One week after election - change of administration offered a huge opportunity
• Used site to quickly prepare succinct policy statement, presented to key people
• Now working on scientific consensus statement, group has ownership of site
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Lessons Learned
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What do Scientists Need?
• Secure, private areas for data, discussions - with control over access
• Places to share
• Grey literature
• Bibliographies
• Information about papers published elsewhere (respecting copyright)
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What do Scientists Need?
• Collaboration spaces for joint authoring
• Too much passing documents via email - who has the latest?
• Support for all levels of web savvy
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What’s Easy in Plone
• Features largely meet the needs
• Custom content types for specific uses
• Everyone gets WYSIWYG editing
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What’s Hard in Plone
• Getting users started
• Shifting from uploading docs to editing pages
• Training required for some things
• Folder structure, information architecture
• Collections, portlets, how to set up sharing
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What’s Hard in Plone
• Getting a new discussion forum off the ground...
• Commenting on content is easier to instigate and should work better
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Tips for Success
• Keep it simple and focussed
• Develop iteratively - they won’t know what they want until they’ve seen it
• Set up site structure ahead of time (generic setup)
• Set up structure of Member areas too (event handler)
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Tips for Success
• Train a site admin who will personally mentor the scientists (especially on bibliographies)
• Beware adding features that will complicate migrations - bad for customers and gives Plone a bad name
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Tips for Success
• Beware of ambitions for discussion forums, social networking features
• Unlikely to be successful at small scales
• Focus on what Plone is good at - content management
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Questions, Discussion?