IDI Website Goals and Functions

Owned by Jonathan Hung
Last updated: Jun 29, 2011Version comment
2 min read

Website Goals

  • Provide general information about the IDI, its resources and infrastructure, and its research clusters.
  • Allow an IDI member to request, book, use, and return an IDI resource.
  • Facilitate and encourage collaboration between IDI members and interested parties (allowing for knowledge sharing with discussions, documents, media, etc.).

Audience

The website will be designed to appeal to a broad audience across demographics and disciplines. The spectrum of users to be addressed are:

Participating IDI member (High Priority)

  • Associated with a partner institution and familiar with the IDI related project they are working on.
  • Already has an understanding of the IDI.
  • Seeking a platform to share knowledge and articulate the work they are doing.
  • Perhaps will use the IDI website as a facility to do some collaborative work.
  • Will want to book facilities/equipment, and keep in touch with IDI activities

Person unfamiliar with the IDI looking to get informed

  • Looking for general information about the IDI, projects, and what the IDI does.
  • May want to keep in touch with IDI activities

Interested person seeking knowledge and engagement

  • Some familiarity with the IDI, and seeking to find specific information on projects.
  • May look to take next steps: deeper knowledge on a particular project, communication with the community, or contacting a project/cluster member.
  • My want to keep in touch with IDI activities

Functions

  • Share knowledge on ongoing research and ideas in the form of documents, media, and organic conversation. (High Priority)
  • Create and edit periodic content like blogs, news, and project updates.
  • Search and view IDI resources like facilities and equipment.
  • Request, book, use, and return IDI resources.
  • Create and edit static content (i.e. About pages, contact information, etc.)
  • Contact IDI cluster leads and IDI administration.
  • Search shared knowledge and conversations.
  • View, and search a directory of users, partners, and organizations involved / related to the IDI.
  • Manage and view a calendar on different levels: IDI as a whole, research clusters, projects, and individuals.

Possible Technology

1. CMS

  • accessible
  • transformable content (to use with UI options)
  • customizable markup and appearance
  • Besides providing the content backbone for the site, it will need to handle news items (in a blogesque manner) and Twitter feeds

2. Calendering system

  • Publicly viewable calendars for events, and equipment/spaces
  • Member-editable

3. Booking system

  • View inventory and availability of equipment and spaces
  • Provide images, video of the equipment
  • Maps / directions
  • Booking of equipment and spaces (+ reminders of nearly/overdue equipment, cancellations, location information, etc.)
  • Integration with calendering system (low priority)

4. Wiki

  • accessible
  • transformable content (to use with UI options)
  • customizable markup and appearance
  • page-level privleges (restrict editing to a subset of users)
  • commenting system:
    • anonymous posting
    • moderation ability
    • comment flagging / reporting
    • rich content in comments (images, video, links)
  • page grouping / categorization
  • virtual wiki spaces

5. Mailing list

  • integration with user account on website CMS (low priority)

Reference

The above content is gathered based on the following documents: