Forum OpenACS Q&A: Moodle driven: Use .LRN for openacs.org ?

1: Moodle driven: Use .LRN for openacs.org ?

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 09/02/04 12:30 PM

While trying to upgrade openacs.org (can someone hand over sudo to me, please

) to the latest version of OpenACS I was wondering if it would make sense to establish openacs communities using .LRN.

First of all this would allow us to have a german community. And trust me, there are people that speak even worse english than I do. Not to forget the Spanish community.

There has been a time where fear has been rising, we would split the information too far and too much. Let's put it this way, currently not all OCT members are subscribed to the OpenACS forums anymore, due to the fact that it is too much noise. If we split this up a little bit, people could work in the communities they are interested in and the OCT would just make sure to have one member in each community (language specific ones are excempt).

Other things that I deem useful:

- Community specific events
- Community specific news
- Community specific file storage
- Make projects that develop openacs packages use openacs.org for coordination than their own instance. This way we would learn of projects before the 1.0 release.

Please give some feedback here and let's discuss things, so that I could make a clear proposal and a TIP in the process.

2: Re: Moodle driven: Use .LRN for openacs.org ? (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 09/02/04 03:04 PM

Why not just use plain old acs-subsite?

I think it makes more sense to use OpenACS built in features rather then the full blown .LRN system that contains many applicaton specific items we don't need. Eventually we want to move the general community features into subsite. We already have a .LRN subsite setup here, but noone uses or maintains it.

So I guess my opinion is, we don't really need it, the community it not really that busy.

If it was decided to do it, we should use subsites, not .LRN. And we would need a way to get a full view of all projects as well.

3: Re: Moodle driven: Use .LRN for openacs.org ? (response to 2)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 09/02/04 04:19 PM

The main reason not to go with plain old subsites: Aggregation of content. But you are aware of that, so we'd have to develop this somehow for subsites :).

4: How to more efficiently monitor the OpenACS community (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 09/02/04 05:07 PM

Responding to part of your motivation for this, is the fact that it takes too much time to monitor what's going on in the OpenACS community.

I've struggled with this for a while. I spend much more time than I would like just reading OpenACS email. I've tried going stretches without reading this forum or the other, but I always end up feeling like I'm missing out on important information.

One idea I've had is for people to take on forums that they will monitor, and write up daily summary postings, in the vein of the Debian Weekly News (see http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/) for an example)

I would volunteer to take on one forum if some other people volunteered to take on the rest. We would need about 4 or 5 people to volunteer, however, and they would have to commit to really producing one per day, or at least one every couple of days.

Any volunteers? This will REDUCE the amount of time you'll need every day to monitor the OpenACS forums. But it only works if we have a critical mass of volunteers.

6: Re: Moodle driven: Use .LRN for openacs.org ? (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 09/03/04 07:16 AM

Malte, OCT members can't keep up with daily openacs.org Forums notifications? Seriously? I find this surprising, even shocking, as the openacs.org Forums aren't exactly high traffic. In fact, the relatively high signal to noise ratio is what has kept me reading even during the times that I'm doing little or no OpenACS related work.

5: Re: Moodle driven: Use .LRN for openacs.org ? (response to 1)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 09/03/04 07:50 AM

There's been some discussion about how to organize openacs.org after the upgrade. Lars makes a list[1] and Randy Ferrer suggests a new section [2].

I'd like to see a set of subsites mainly to support blogs/wikis (with rss feeds) and related chatter (such as via a dedicated forum). Maybe the subsites could be: end-users, administration, developers.. or a subsite for each supported package (or package group).

The main site could pull together the rss etc from the subsites.

Also, there seemed to be a consensus a while back to at least try using categorization with forums to solve some of these broad topic problems.[3]

1. http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=155099

2. http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=127876

3. http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=92820

7: Re: Moodle driven: Use .LRN for openacs.org ? (response to 1)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 09/03/04 08:01 AM

Oh, and Alfred Werner expresses the importance of how site organization drives documentation[4] --relevant here, as it suggests how the new site might be abstractly organized.

http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=92725

8: Re: Moodle driven: Use .LRN for openacs.org ? (response to 6)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 09/03/04 08:02 AM

Andrew, I knew from a former OCT member that (s)he was not able to cope with this, that's where my comment came from, so I'd have to change it to past tense.