Global Plant Sciences Initiative Website Update

The GPSI website is slated to go live in January of 2009. We at CTLT have just finished developing a new, slightly modified design of the site and wanted to share a screen shot.

I'm still not sure what the final url will be, but the current, password protected address is https://teamsite.oue.wsu.edu/gpsi.

GPSI Update

I had someone comment on another blog entry (Global Plant Sciences Initiative - Paying the Bills) and ask whether the GPSI site is up. The answer to that is yes and no. The site is near completion, but it will not go public for sometime, at least that is the impression I get. Nevertheless the site design is near complete and since it is still locked down from public view I decided to present a screen shot to show what has been accomplished so far.







The next few steps for the project are to get additional feedback from the stakeholders involved, make any needed changes, conduct a workshop on using the site, begin uploading content and and then permission the site for public view and participation.

From what I gather this seems to be scheduled for Spring of 09, but it could be sooner. Yet, that is not up to me. Anyway, it has been a fun project and continues to be!

GPSI Site

So after some wrestling with various approaches to building the GPSI site with SharePoint it was decided that we would go with the Collaboration Site approach. Though the workflow features are much weaker than with the Publishing Site application provided in SharePoint, there seems to be greater flexibility in design. For me, what was perhaps most important for this particular group was the ease for me in abstracting the complexity of SharePoint from the GPSI site users.

In the case of a Publishing Site there seems to be a great deal of power, but with that power comes greater complexity and therefore greater responsibility, which would mean more work for me in fixing screw ups, or in writing extensive how-tos. Ugh!

Anyway, I think we can accomplish what we are attempting to do here without the Publishing Site application. However, it is clear that no matter what, I'm gonna have to role up the sleeves and get into the CLR and start playing around with some IronPyton.

And though the site is not public the url is/will be: https://teamsite.oue.wsu.edu/gpsi

Global Plant Sciences Initiative - Paying the Bills

While many grad students get stuck with crappy jobs of servitude in order to obtain their PhD, I get to have fun. Even though I’m an Environmental and Natural Resource Sciences PhD student my special and apparently much sought after skills in CMS development has afforded me the opportunity to break out of the mold and do something other than push loads of paper work. Instead I will be the lead developer for the new Global Plant Sciences Initiative web site that will serve as the front face for the GPSI and act as a collaborative space for experts in plant sciences, biotech, biofuel, ag sciences and other disciplines from around the world.

What is this, you ask! Well, the GPSI is a project aimed at bringing all of these disciplines together in order to identify socially, economically and environmentally friendly solutions to energy and food production around the world. It will also serve as a space for graduate students to add to existing knowledge and contribute to the research and global conversation regarding this very important issue.

My part in this grand scheme will be to build the site, provide add-on tools to the base SharePoint package, develop the site architecture including the underling ontologies for linking knowledge with people, projects and institutions. Once this is complete I will be maintaining the site, training staff and graduate students on effective means for utilizing the site.

The site shell will be up by Monday afternoon as I’m working on the prototype throughout the weekend. I'll post the new URL once I have something worth showing

Collaborators in this project include:
WSU – (which include the depts….)

• Molecular Plant Sciences


• School of Economic Sciences


• Civil and Environmental Engineering


• Plant Pathology


• Horticulture


• Mathematics


• Crops and Soil Sciences


• Institute of Biological Chemistry


• School of Biological Sciences


• Center for Teaching Learning and Technology

Also, the USDA and the University of Washington

Building Networks to Support CSAs

For the past few days I have been reading an interesting book titled, "Civic Agriculture" by Thomas Lyson. It is a plain English overview on the emergence of alternative forms of food production systems. It lays out a quick survey of the mainstream industrial food-system model that permeates most of the US and abroad (among developed nations). This serves as a contrast to what Lyson sees as an alternative paradigm that is taking root here in America.

Yet, just as these alternative forms of food production and distribution take hold and fill the spaces that have been ignored or passed over by the dominant system it seems that the modern, firm based system is actually consolidating power and becoming stronger. So if this assessment is true then what opportunities do communities have to take control of the hegemony (and homogeneity) of food production in America? How can a relatively marginalized movement rise as a truly powerful and viable replacement to the current system?

One of Lyson's answers to these questions came out in regards to the development of networks to support Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). He writes: "

CSAs are an important part of civic agriculture. They strengthen the local food economy and preserve farm land. A web of connected and cooperatively organized CSAs could represent a real and viable alternative to the mass-produced, homogeneous, imported produce found in most supermarkets today.

"
Unfortunately, when one does a simple search on CSAs or CSA networks one finds a relatively small number of connected and cooperatively operated ventures that not only provide alternatives but that work to promote a full fledged food movement. That is not to say that local networks do not exist, but rather they appear to be few and far between. Thus it seems that there needs to be a concerted effort on building up the necessary connections between one another to help foment a "true movement."

This got me thinking and I have spent a couple of hours each evening for the past few days working on building a few applications geared towards building a quasi-social networking system. I have this free Google App Engine account and needed to do something with it. Plus, this gives me an opportunity to learn how to use the webapp framework. For right now it is just a little fun project, but on a serious note there does in fact appear to be a need here.

My hope is to provide a usable and free web space where CSAs, their supporters and unaffiliated advocates can construct mini-sites and link up with one another. The suite of apps include or will include:

• CSA Mini-Site CMS


• CSA Blogs (unless I can get blogger to play nicely)


• Google Map Integration


• Survey Tools


• People Aggregator (this will link users of similar interests/locations/etc)

Now, I'm just building a clunky little prototype, something I can complete in my copious amount of spare time. But I would really like to find some people or group of people that can actually devote the time to this and just take it off of my hands. What would be even more interesting is if WSU Extension sponsored a project like this and actually take this opportunity seriously. My thinking is if you want to be a "world class institution" then promote and fund "world class projects."

Can't Help It - Interesting Article (But perhaps un-informed)

So the Editorial Board at WSU's Daily Evergreen published an interesting editorial piece on the failure of MySite.

While I think there are definitely criticisms to be made, I think the writers missed the real issue, or at least most of it.
First, let's see where I agree:

1. Cost! Yes, MySite is expensive and I think there are other technologies such as Plone, Alfresco and others that could do what we want at a fraction of the cost.


2. Simplicity: MySite is complicated compared to the other technologies mentioned in the article. However, so are the technologies, I mentioned above. And yet they aren’t as simple as apps such as FaceBook or Google products like Blogger. That is because a CMS is more than just a blog.


3. What is MySite for? I think most people are unsure and perhaps that is because of the misconceptions of what it is. Perhaps the name makes everyone think MySpace or FaceBook. I think the complexity of what it is and the inability to express what it is, makes for problematic adoption.


4. The notion of providing more public web-space is great. I think both could serve a very useful purpose. However, WSU already provides free public web space for students! I would suggest more disk-space and dynamic scripting support, like PHP, support for Ruby on Rails and Django, and of course a back-end option with MySQL or even SQLite.

Ok, where I find the article a bit misguided.

My General Response:
To equate MySite to MySpace or FaceBook is misrepresenting what each application does. MySite is more than a social networking site. It is a student's own implementation of an Enterprise-Level content management system (CMS). The kind of thing many people are being forced to adopt in the work place. Using MySpace or FaceBook usually gets you the evil stare from your boss, not the "Wow, he/she is being productive!"

And while there are cheaper applications that can do many of the same things as MySite (Plone, Alfresco, Drupal), the fact remains, these are all CMS applications with a related paradigm. This related paradigm is utilized in nearly every organization that is adopting CMS technologies to deliver and manage content within their organization. This is across the board, regardless if you are in the for-profit or non-profit sector.

Now, for some direct responses -

The Evergreen:

"It’s difficult to place MySite in a distinct subgroup of functionality, as it does so many things but falls flat on its face when it comes to implementation. While MySite does have some of the same features as Facebook or MySpace, it’s limited to those with WSU Network IDs or Friend IDs only. Perhaps that sounded like a good privacy or security initiative when it was first proposed, but there’s no benefit to having a “walled garden” system restricted to WSU."

Response:
Funny, MySpace and Facebook both require passwords for use! In a sense you have to be a part of their club in order to benefit from the service. In reality there is no difference, NetworkID/Friend ID, MySpace User ID, ummm unless I missed something. Also, your MySite doesn't have to be walled; mine is completely open to anonymous users (see here), nothing is private. The only problem is right now you can't leave comments, but that is only because I haven't added a message board.

Also, I can aggregate all my other social-net sites into MySite and create a mash-up of my relevant content. So I can place a web-part viewer in my MySite that brings in content from MySpace and FaceBook. I had a MySpace page in my MySite, but removed it as I don't go there as much. Now, I just have some RSS for my blog, but if I wanted I could embed my blog and all inside a MySite.

The Evergreen:

"There are other services out there that students already use to perform the tasks that MySite is designed to handle. Not only are they better in many cases than MySite’s offerings, but they’re familiar and thus easier for students to use. For educational purposes, services like Blackboard and WebCT – which are used by colleges all over the country – seem to be working fine."

Response:
Again, I agree with the issue of simplicity, but again you will NEVER USE BLACKBOARD in the real-world. Also, the easy of Blackboard makes easy candidate for assimilation. We could port the Blackboard model into MySite.

Conclusion:
While some frustration is warranted, I think the frustration is misplaced and perhaps there is a solution to find before we go claiming a technology didn’t work when we have just learned about its potential. That’s like saying, “Damn, PHP what the hell is this? It is too complicated! Why not just stick with HTML?”

I think what is really needed is focused training on how to utilize the MySite/SharePoint technology. It seems by judging from the article that even the authors do not know what is available through the technology, or how to do what they may want.

In fact, I think this is WSU’s fault totally. For instance, you can find numerous end-user training sessions on Plone, Drupal, Alfresco and even SharePoint going on around the world at any given time. Why? Because it is complicated and there is a learning curve before someone can become a power-user. Unfortunately, WSU has not had any sort of Boot-Camp to get people educated. There seems to be more talk about what the system is capable of, but little on how you can harness that capability.