IDI Website Goals and Functions
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: