User:Ricardo Vidal/workshed

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Misc projects

 * Keeping things tidy
 * Screencasts
 * Graphic stuff
 * Main page prototype
 * Lab notebook prototype
 * Lab notebook tutorial

Wanted features

 * Customizable xfeeds extension features
 * CSS handles
 * Text length
 * Div ids

Assorted ideas/notes

 * Hover notes thingy like Flickr (extension) - This would allow one to add notes to images without actually altering the original file.
 * Seamless layout that allows one to go from wiki to blog without too much graphic difference. Try not to make it look like the users are leaving OWW when reading a blog. (Ex: http://wiki.shift.pt/doku.php )
 * Software ideas for blogs

Questions

 * One of the key features of wikis is the collaborative environment it provides. Openness of content on the wiki could be leveraged to help with problems, questions and general inquiries. One way to do this would be through a "Question and answer" extension that would work something like this:
 * The user that has a question would place it on the pertaining page by using a couple of  tags.
 * These questions could be all aggregated on a "We need help!" page and organized based on the categories inserted in the pages to where they belong (if original pages have categories properly set)
 * Or we could organize the questions into categories by use an attribute within the tag
 * The question I'd like to have answered would go here?

Activity/Watch/Follow Page

 * Improved watch page that allows us to follow activity on pages or people. By making specific changes that are easy to track, commenting is faster and we have a better sense of what is being done on the wiki.
 * Follow a friend/user - see all the edits and activity generated by a specific user
 * Follow the work of a lab or IGEM group - capture all the activity taking place within the labs namespace not just the one page.
 * This could possibly be done using the Related Changes Special page.

Brand Management Considerations
The following list has been copied from Branding Strategy Insider (my comments in grey)

What are the most important considerations in brand management?


 * Deeply understand the target customer
 * This is a topic of discussion and related to the future "business model"
 * Promise one or two benefits that are unique, compelling and believable
 * This would most probably the benefit of timestamped edits and future publishing of protocols
 * Capture your brand’s promise in a tagline or slogan
 * The slogan: Share Your Science, is pretty much what we are trying to do.
 * Aggressively build awareness
 * This should/must be achieved through intensive networking, which includes blogging
 * Deliver on the brand promise at each point of customer contact
 * Quite sure this means that we must deliver what we set out to initially
 * Market to your employees first – turn them into brand champions
 * This is already done with the steering committee, right?
 * Present your brand’s identity accurately and consistently
 * This is important!

Outreach

 * Interesting pages box - A section could be created on the homepage (or a community page) that calls the users attention to a specific useful and interesting page. There are dozens of links with interesting information that are not accessed regularly and could become great resources. Which ones you ask? Here's just a few:
 * How to write a thesis proposal, How to publish a paper, Searching the literature;
 * Communicating your results through Papers, Posters, Talks, Software for papers, posters and talks, Visualization or just Communicating science to the public;
 * How to write a letter of recommendation


 * A small list of them could be compiled in a specialpage or tagged as "very interesting" and then displayed randomly to visitors of the site. I'm sure they'd become greatly used.

Organizing OWW
This is a list of steps that I consider essential to make OWW better organized and easier to use.
 * A new set of tutorials for new/recent users. These tutorials should be step-based and when possible accompanied by screencasts (videos).
 * Hierarchical pages - this is very important to keep the wiki organized. Many new users place their pages in the wrong place.
 * Forms to kick-start pages. These forms can be implemented on a page-type basis. If creating a protocol page, the form would show fields for material, methods, notes, etc. These forms would only appear on first edit.
 * Setup a page (community page, activity page, features page) that will concentrate featured and active pages on the wiki. This page depends on the creation of new functions/extensions that allow to create and follow such activity.
 * Vote page up/down (à lá Digg)
 * Lab Notebook Milestone marker (feature a project's status)
 * Latest users & Map with location (this is easier if country and city are made compulsory on sign up)
 * Focus on outreach by creating some plugins/widgets for blogs and other sites to display related OWW pages (ie Google Adsense). Also get a page together with all the buttons and banners available with code for easy insertion in html.
 * Edit count top 10 (activity != interesting --> logs, order pages, etc)