Forum OpenACS Q&A: KMS Breakout Session at Heidelberg .LRN Meeting: Ideas/ Priorities

A number of us (perhaps whoever kept the signup list can post it) generated and voted on a list of KM-related OACS enhancement ideas Saturday afternoon in Heidelberg.

Here's the list in order of popularity (each person could vote for three ideas):

1. UI enhancements to existing capabilities (8 votes)
2. Accelerating contribution of Jeff Davis' KMS work into OACS (8)
3. "cc email into .LRN workspace" -- enabling .LRN to receive cc's of emails and place them in a group-specific log (this feature existed on the old ArsDigita 3.4 intranet and was originally developed by Jeff and Henry but has since been lost) (7)
4. enabling a .LRN user to designate "trusted friends" and watch for new content from these people (forum posts, blog posts, documents, maybe events they register for, etc.) (6)
5. resurrect "member value" -- some sort of user rating system (5)
6. Sharenet-style metadata interface for being able to define / extend knowledge objects (4)
7. making categorization of content as easy as commenting on it (this was Joel's idea) (3)
8. search multiple .LRN sites (2)
9. syndicating content across various .LRN implmentations using RSS and extensions (or whatever makes sense, but you get the idea) (2)
10. fixing the "my profile" page so it can (once again) list all actions by a given user on the site, like it worked in ACS 3.x (1)
11. adding back the old "new" label/ flag that appeared next to content that a given user had not yet seen (1)
12. "expert find" (really "find and expert" I think) (1)
13. pre-sorting forum post summary emails according to what the user cares about, rather than simple chronological administration (0)
14. fix smileys in forum post (??) (0)
15. some mechanism to engage 7700 unengaged OACS community members (for example, periodic poll/ survey?) (0)

So what?  For people who care about advancing OACS KM capabilities, who might have a marginal hour to help but are not sure what to work on, this is a guide for where they might focus.  Summary -- talk to Bruce Spear or Jeff Davis for suggestions on how to help.

I have written a general ratings package and will probably do member value as well but am probably not going to do explicit social networking things (at least not in this round of the community of practice work I am doing). The code is in cvs in contrib as cop-base and cop-ui.

One word of warning, it is likely that I will refactor the ratings, visits, related items, and clipboarding functionality of cop-base into seperate packages so if you want to use it be aware that the namespaces may change drastically (although I don't think the datamodel or code itself should change much).

We have the CoP stuff deployed several sites and use pieces of it for a few others. The version of the code we deploy is a branch which has some per client customization. I made an effort to pull those changes back in but clearly a couple client specific bits crept in. I will revert that change (the changes we made to page were to provide an easy way for them to add a page like "about us" and have it show up where they wanted in the sidebar nav w/o having to have a fullblown cms).

If you have a patch for the clipboard you could submit it in bug tracker and I will apply it.