Sounds like a community of practice itching for a digital habitat; as such, just a forum or listserve won't accommodate the varying needs such networks tend to require; headings like the following could potentially come in useful:
- Homepage: introducing the community to newcomers; detailing important network news; highlighting projects people are working on
- Latest Additions: possibly based on a saved search of all site content ordered by most recently added/updated
- Topics: relevant articles authored by members of the network; this should be ordered into a comprehensive classification of the community's domain/field of interest and help people doing their day to day work.
- Tools: Manipulable documents; templates, useful software, plug-ins, extensions, themes. This might include a sandpit, open permissions area where members can play with aspects of Sharepoint.
- Learning: information about universities to attend, training courses, eLearning content and other CPD information
- Links: listing other relevant external organisations/communities/sites
- Forum: This is clearly an integral aspect of the community, and where they often start off
- Calendar: a diary of events showing where members can meet face to face or online for webinars etc., Events should be in .ics format so users can download to their personal calendar software
- News: could be based on a Yahoo! pipe of various RSS feeds from blogs and other relevant news sources as well as providing an archive of network news
- People & Plans: information about community members (based on OpenID, if possible), how to join it, who does what - the site admin, events co-ordinator, academic lead, community figurehead, press officer, bean-counter and son on - and what their plans are for the Network into the future
- Sitemap: should be auto-generated
- Search: should be prominently placed on every screen and return results from across the site
I could go into much further detail on each of the above headings,
having written and had signed off high-level specifications, worked with developers on
implementing the details, rolled out to over 80 communities of practice,
and sought feedback on almost all of them.
Whatever the case, getting even half these features into one site requires a content management system such as Drupal, Joomla, Ning, Alfresco or, of course, Sharepoint. Which seems the obvious choice given the domain this 'me too' community is keen to cover.
All the best
Adam Pope
07977238873
London 7755 2916
www.informationhandyman.com
For any technical queries re JISC please email [log in to unmask]
For any content based queries, please email [log in to unmask]
