Meeting minutes for Monday 26/05/08

Minutes for second meeting on design & content of cellml.org

Present: James Lawson, Gareth de Walters, Tommy Yu, Catherine Lloyd, Poul Nielsen


Proposal that a 'working groups' category be added under the listing on the left of the site.

  • This item suggests that there be a top-level link from the site's category listing sidebar to a folder which could contain information about various working groups within the CellML community. This working group on the content and design of cellml.org is one example, the PCEnv / COR / CellML API developers are another example.
  • The information contained within this category could include meeting minutes and any other notes / proposals / wikis etc. being produced by the working group.
  • There was concern over adding another item to the already cluttered sidebar; Catherine suggested that since the content would be mainly meeting minutes, that the current 'Meeting Minutes' category under 'Community' is still appropriate.
  • The ABI CellML Team meeting minutes are all in the top level folder. This means that the subfolders are only visible if the user scrolls down to the bottom of the page. We could tidy this up significantly by moving the ABI CellML Team minutes into a subfolder of their own.
  • Tommy mentioned that 'smart folders' in Plone 3 can be programmed to list their contents in a specific way.

Alternatives to the current 'persistent sidebar' navigation architecture

  • The 'persistent sidebar' is currently the main feature provided for users to navigate cellml.org, but it is getting cluttered and is arbitrarily ordered.
  • Poul would like to see a more powerful, better organised navigation architecture than the current sidebar provides.
  • He questions the current categorisation scheme and suggests a rethink of how we identify the major categories of information that the site serves.
  • At present, information on the site can have only one location, and most pages can be reached through only one route.
  • Users can not easily find 'related information' on pages. For example, under 'Specifications,' it would be useful to provide not only the specifications, but also a link to ongoing discussions concerning the CellML 1.2 specification, or to the working document for CellML 1.2
  • James suggested that we could be using tags to help organise information.
  • Gareth noted that we would need a controlled vocabulary for tagging information, and that this should be fairly easy to implement.
  • Poul was interested in this idea, but questioned how tagged information might be presented to the user.
  • He suggested that the controlled vocabulary be structured in a relatively orthogonal manner, with information being sorted by relationships further away from main nodes. Determining what the major nodes should be would then determine site structure.
  • The current site structure is possibly an artifact of Plone but there need not be any relationship between the way information is stored and the way it is presented.
  • James suggested that being able to weight tags would be useful.

Content audit

  • The plan is to split up the site into bite-sized chunks and distribute the audit among ourselves.
  • Gareth has a spreadsheet template for recording content audit information. Includes:
    • "page name" (Plone title)
    • "link" (URL)
    • "file type" (e.g. image, page, pdf)
    • "ROT" (redundant, outdated, trivial)
    • "keywords" (populate later)
    • "owner/maintainer" (ignore)
  • The CellML repository won't be audited.
  • Gareth sort out even workload distribution and email us.