Hi,
My name is Shelly Grist. I’m a PhD student and Lecturer at University of Southern Queensland in Australia. I’ve got a fair bit of programming experience – 9 years working in the U.S. aerospace industry developing communication and satellite test systems (TRW) and then 2 years developing computer games (Philips Media, Dreamworks Interactive). I moved to Australia in 1999 and since then I’ve worked as a Web developer and taught courses in programming, online business, etc for the School of Information Systems at USQ.
I'm a relative newbie to FOSS and SilverStripe. For my PhD project I’m developing a community research and collaboration site. I chose to use open source tools because the focus of the site is to encourage researchers in the life cycle assessment area to work together to generate the environmental data that is necessary for all. The philosophy of the site therefore parallels the ethos of the open source community. I chose SilverStripe because it follows web standards, is built on solid design patterns and I liked its separation of roles within the CMS. I want to code, not interact with a GUI.
My PhD project is designed to function as a research commons – a place for researchers to communicate, collaborate and connect. Hence I’ve named it C3 Commons. The fundamental design includes blogs, forums, publication and data libraries, and areas for researchers to provide tutorials, video links, general knowledge, etc. It shares some common features with sites like citeulike.org and zotero.org. Since this is an open source project my intention is to make the code available for anyone to download and use once my PhD is complete.
For the GSoC I’d like to focus on a few specific areas that could be developed as SilverStripe 3.0 modules. Two possibilities are an updated Multi Blog Holder module and my Publications Library. I’ve included a blog module because the current Blog module doesn’t seem to provide the functionality that I need (see question on Blog Module forum 13 March). I’m not quite sure how the third area, Social Network Elements, could be modularized since I think it will be too site specific but I’m very open to suggestions.
Here’s an outline of my ideas for features and functionality.
Multi Blog: (not started)
· All members have a blog created for them when they register.
· Blog entries only editable by member author and admin members with BLOG_MGMT permissions.
· Member’s ‘Your Space’ only displays member’s blog entries.
· Community Space displays ALL member blogs ordered/filtered by member name, tag, or search word.
· Blog Entries can have a pic, title and tags.
· All member blog entries viewable and searchable.
· All members have a publication library created for them when they register.
· Publications can be uploaded in RIS format to member’s library, community library or both.
· Members can add reviews, tags, ask questions or provide answers to any publication in the community library or their personal library. All additional publication metacontent added to the community library is viewable and searchable by all members. Metacontent added to a member’s library is kept private.
· Members can add usefulness ratings to a publication’s metacontent added by other members.
· Publication tag clouds and member clouds – typical tag style cloud to show number of publications with matching tags, and members with similar publications in their library.
· Recommendation system for:
o publications,
o potential members with whom to collaborate
· Social Network Analysis map displaying publication/member/author/tag association/relationships using Two-mode networks.