Scientific Collaboration with Plone:

A Case StudySally Kleinfeldt

Plone Symposium East 2009

Background

• Collaboration site for Advancing Green Chemistry

• Fall 2008 Jazkarta project

• Me? I’m an ecologist...

Overview

• Organization

• Opportunity

• Solution

• Lessons

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...”

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

Problem

• How to create collaboration where there is none? How to orchestrate joint:

• Conferences

• Papers

• Policy development

Solution

• A private website that provides a safe, trusted environment for members to discuss ideas that might be controversial in mainstream venues

Solution

• Website features:

• Invited members

• Relevant news, papers, bibliographies

• Wiki-like collaboration areas

• Discussion forums

Plone Features Well Suited to Problem

• Secure document sharing

• Rich pages, news, events, calendars

• Wiki behavior

• Commenting

• Related content

• Member areas

Add-on Products Provide The Rest

• Discussions (PloneBoard)

• Integrated news feeds (FeedFeeder)

• Bibliographiies (CMFBibliographyAT)

• Papers, summaries (Easy to create custom content types)

The Site

• Home page with portlets for news, members, discussion posts, announcements

Members

• Browse and search members

• Portlet for most active members (based on count of content)

• Portlet for most recent members

Member Profiles

• Extra fields (projects, affiliations...)

• Member area preconfigured to contain bibliography and papers (custom type)

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

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

Discussions

• Implemented with PloneBoard

• Not much activity

Ad Hoc Collaborations

• New area created during conference

• Notes, ideas, policy documents

• Responding to opportunity presented by new administration

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

Lessons Learned

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)

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

What’s Easy in Plone

• Features largely meet the needs

• Custom content types for specific uses

• Everyone gets WYSIWYG editing

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

What’s Hard in Plone

• Getting a new discussion forum off the ground...

• Commenting on content is easier to instigate and should work better

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)

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

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

Questions, Discussion?