Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to OpenACS as SourceForge

Neophytos,

Though not wanting to get into a dotLRN vs OACS (vanilla) war, I would still tend to agree with Ben.

More important than just scoping, is the need to manage knowledge. What I think openACS gives you (from a tech perspective) is a platform (via subsites etc) on which to build systems like dotLRN. Most people using openACS would be using it to build web services, and would be 'borrowing' authentication, versioning, subsiting etc from the core.

dotLRN takes it to another level. While a lot of sites will not use subsiting, and might be a community site for one homogenous group, others do, heavily. dotLRN seems to give someone developing (for lack of a better expression) and asp for communities a leg up.

Some of the more interesting and appealing features in dotLRN (for me at least, include

• fairly generic starter apps (calendar, file storage, news, forums tc) which most communities would find useful. It is therefore quite useable straight out of the box.
• a framework to allow one to create portlets for apps to make them scoping/subsiting friendly. This is a good thing (tm). If everyone has their own mini-dotlrn-type-app running, then there is less sharing in the community as their code would be useless to anyone else.
• an easy way of creating and deleteing multiple communities. This is really useful as it allows managers and not techies to manage the uber community. Try telling someone to create a subsite, and mount packages x, y, and z..... With all due respect, given a choice between Jun's hack and dotLRN, I would choose dotLRN anyday.
• a fairly simple way of administering individual communities. Again, this allows admin to be done by those in the trenches.
• personally though, the most important feature is the ability to easily aggregate content from communities and subcommunities into a single personal portal. You can imagine a software project with subprojects for UI, documentation, bug fixing, testing etc. dotLRN would allow you choose which subprojects, including the core you wanted to be involved in. So you suffer less from useless-information-overload, and can track your interest in that project from one page. Actuall, arguing this to the extreme, you can have a mySourceForgePage where you can keep track of all the communities you are interested in.

You might well argue that one can do this with the standard toolkit using subsites, and portal... true. Why though duplicate the effort when you can use dotLRN to give you a boost?

The only thing I would add to dotLRN is the ability to categorise content, and so allow aggregation not only by community/project, but also along knowledge themes. eg, I am interested in all entertainment events, across all communities (this implicitly requires the system to allow tagging of an event as an entertainment event, or a news item being one on entertainment).