The purpose of this report is to provide an update on the new website and its adoption by the community and to propose constituting the Online Committee as a standing committee.
Background
The ad hoc Online Committee has been leading the creation of a new website based upon the Plone Content Management System (CMS) in partnership with SixFeetUp, Inc. A web CMS allows multiple content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML/CSS or the uploading of files. Plone is a leading open-source web CMS, and a Plone developer like SixFeetUp helps customize the software to suit specific needs.
Project Update
The Online Committee has been quite active since Allerton 2008. In addition to regular website updates for the beginning of the calendar year, we continued software development with SixFeetUp, launched the new website, and helped a number of Society members get started using the new website and its features. The remainder of this section provides more detail on each of these fronts.
Software Development
Although the Plone CMS has a number of features out of the box, the software can be customized to provide custom graphics, content types, and user interface enhancements to make it more appealing and useful for Society members.
- Plone content management system (CMS)
- Open-source, estimated value ~$250K out of the box
- Provides user accounts, access control, roles, workflow, integrated search
- Standard News, Event, Image, File, Folder, and Collection (Search) content objects
- Desired Customizations
- Graphic design
- Dynamic main homepage
- Custom Profile, Papers, Awards, Group, and Meeting content objects
- Email obfuscation
- Documentation
The Online Committee has contracted SixFeetUp, Inc. to perform these customizations with a budget of up to $70K approved by the BoG at Allerton 2007 ($60K) and Allerton 2008 ($10K). The development effort has been broken into multiple stages with milestones near Officer and BoG meetings.
| Stage | Timeframe | Estimated | Spent | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery & Requirements | 4/08-5/08 | $2,850 | $2,850 | |
| Phase I Design & Development | 5/08-11/08 | $54,720 | $56,442 | 594 hours billed, 21 not billed |
| Phase I Bug Fixes & Enhancements | 2/09-present | $9,788 | $8,705 | 78 hours billed, 45 not billed (as of 3/13/09) |
| Project | 4/08-present | $67,358 | $67,997 |
Throughout this process, the Online Committee has learned how to run web development projects, and SixFeetUp has been a great development partner (creative, responsive, professional, and altruistic). Because we requested additional functionality beyond the initial scope of work, certain components took longer and were more expensive than estimated, e.g., graphic design, homepage customizations, and the paper content object. However, we have kept the total costs within the budget approved by the BoG by initially underestimating the scope of work and regularly interacting with SixFeetUp for overall project management.
Launch
As the first major round of development came to a close in late 2008, the Online Committee aimed to launch the new website at ITA 2009. This required substantial migration of content from the old website, getting a contract in place for professional hosting of the website, and generating visibility for the new site.
- Content Migration
- Essentially all of the legacy website (archived at http://legacy.itsoc.org/ )
- Transferred Student Committee website
- Archived ISIT 2007 website
- In the process of moving the old BoG repository, School 2008
- Developing Plone gurus, potential future Online Editors
- Special thanks to Matthieu Bloch, Jean-Francois Chamberland, and Anand Sarwate
- Professional Hosting
- Spruce Goose package from SixFeetUp
- Easily transfer new developments to production site
- 1 year contract
- $318 setup, $119/month
- SixFeetup very helpful in staging the site for launch
- SixFeetUp will continue to examine traffic to match the package to our needs
- Visibility Campaign
- Flyers at ITA 2009 Launch: 2/8/2009
- Email Announcement: 3/5/2009
- Newsletter Article: 6/2009
- Newsletter & Web Solicitations: Monthly?
Future Development
The new website is already quite powerful, and it will take some time for the community to "catch up" to many of its features. Nevertheless, using and developing the website will continue to generate ideas for additional features for some time, and the Online Committee will regularly solicit suggestions and feedback. Based upon past experience, our ability to leverage open-source software as it constantly evolves makes it important to maintain a menu of desired features, identify existing solutions, and obtain cost estimates for custom development work. In some cases, features of great potential value to the Society can be obtained at extremely low cost because of the availability of an existing software module. In other cases, what may seem like simple features may take significant development time because there is not an existing solution to leverage.
| Feature | Estimated Cost |
|---|---|
| Terms & Conditions | $2,250 |
| Embedded Conference Websites | $2,375 |
| Lecture Content Type | $3,000 |
| Math Discussion | $1,750 |
| Group/Vote Enhancements | $9,250 |
- Terms & Conditions: Because the website allows for user registration and content creation, it is important for the Society to (a) create a set of terms and conditions for appropriate and responsible use of the website, particularly in terms of copyright issues, and (b) ensure that members of the community agree to these terms and conditions as they change over time. These are not standard features of Plone, but its foundation allows for a relatively simple solution.
- Embedded Conference Websites: There would be several advantages for conference organizers to create conference websites within the new web infrastructure, including the ability of the Online Committee to provide templates, the ability for conference news and events to automatically propagate to the main website, and the ability to automatically archive conference content. There are two key missing features that would make it much more attractive for conference organizers to use the new web infrastructure: (a) the ability to create an embedded site within the broader site that has a custom look and feel, and (b) the ability to create folders of events that are displayed with more detail in the embedded site and less detail in the main website. The ability to leverage several existing software modules will keep development costs for this set of features relatively low.
- Lecture Content Type: As the community records more and more videos of lectures and talks, it would be useful to have a custom content type that captures and displays the relevant information including title, author bio and photo, slides, and video. As with our other highly custom content types, there is no existing module that provides a perfect fit at this time, but one could become available in the future. As a result, development costs or this set of features may seem higher than others.
- Math Discussion: For a technical community such as ours, the ability to publish content containing mathematics, e.g., LaTeX, to the web may become increasingly important. This ability could allow for full Newsletter columns and articles to be published individually in the website itself rather than requiring PDF. Furthermore, although the community is just beginning to leverage Plone's commenting and discussion mechanism, with LaTeX support this could be used for technical discussion and open review of articles. The availability of open-source modules to enable LaTeX in Plone have reduced the estimated cost of this feature by roughly a factor of 10 since we first obtained such estimates.
- Group/Vote Enhancements: The so-called PeopleList content object behind the BoG, Committee, and Chapter web areas is one of our custom content types used by a rapidly growing number of our community members. Several additional features have been envisioned to make these tools more convenient for group interactions. For example, the ability to (a) quickly add multiple members to a PeopleList, (b) automatically generate emails to all members of a PeopleList, and (c) raise a motion, discuss, and call and archive a vote within a PeopleList. These are among the most custom of all the features, thereby requiring the most development time and therefore cost.
Community Adoption
To encourage and gauge use of the website by the community, the Online Committee has been working with a number of individuals, Committees, and Chapters and also collecting web usage statistics using Google Analytics.
Working with Individuals, Committees, and Chapters
The Online Committee has been actively helping others use the website to share content and interact.
- Over 300 people have registered with the site and updated their Profile. Matthieu Bloch has drafted a nice screencast to help.
- A number of Committees (BoG, Students, Outreach, M&C) and Chapters (Benelux, Korea, Russia, Israel) have started or are starting to use the site for their operations. Anand Sarwate has drafted a nice tutorial to help.
- The Newsletter Editor and Online Editor are working toward a joint solicitation and submission process for announcements, news, and events.
- The School of Information Theory will use the new website for 2009, after a very successful experiment with Plone in 2008.
- ISIT 2010 may use the new website for the conference, allowing us to create a template for symposia and workshops in the future.
Preliminary Usage Statistics
The Online Committee is using Google Analytics to collect usage statistics for the new website, as well as for Pareja. These tools are extremely simple to use with the new website, and provide gobs of information about website usage (number of visits to the site, time on the site, browser capabilities, geographic location, and so on). See our data repository for many, many more details. In the first month of collection (2/9/2009-3/13/2009), we have the following main results:
| statistic | www.itsoc.org | pareja.itsoc.org |
|---|---|---|
| Visits | 8016 | 3108 |
| Visits/Day | 242.91 | 94.18 |
| Pages/Visit | 4.85 | 6.23 |
| Min/Visit | 3:47 | 6:56 |
| Countries | 114 | 62 |
Unfortunately, it is difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons between the new website and the old website in terms of usage statistics. The old website did not use Google Analytics, and the existing usage statistics are inflated by search engines and other web crawlers that Google Analytics does not count. It is also difficult to separate the usage of the main part of the old website from Pareja usage. A quick attempt at taking these into account suggests that there may have been a slight increase of combined website traffic of ~1% since the launch of the new website. Going forward, the Online Committee will be able to provide more information on usage statistics and trends, both over time and geography.
Standing Online Committee
At their ITA 2009 meeting, the Officers encouraged formalizing the Online Committee as a standing committee. This section outlines the potential responsibilities, operating budget, and makeup of such a committee.
Charter
- Keep the website(s) running or manage contracts with hosting partners
- Lead development and integration of web technologies or manage contracts with graphic design and software development partners
- Update content on the websites or coordinate and support the updating of content by others in the Society
- Encourage contributions of content from the Membership
- Regularly report on the status of the website(s) to the Officers and BoG, make recommendations, and execute tasks from the BoG
Operating Budget
- Total: $10-15K/year
- Hosting: $2.5K/year
- Major Plone upgrades: $5K/18 months
- Maintenance development: $5K/year
- Training: $1K/year
Makeup
- Online Editor (Ex Officio and Chair)
- First Vice President, Secretary, Newsletter Editor (Ex Officio)
- Associate Online Editors (Ex Officio)
- Volunteers
Associate Online Editors
The following individuals have volunteered to serve as Associate Online Editors as part of the new Online Committee.
- Matthieu Bloch, GTL
- Jean-Francois Chamberland, TAMU
- Amin Mobasher, Waterloo
- Stefan Moser, NCTU
- Mehul Motani, NUS
- Anand Sarwate, UCSD
- Adriaan J. van Wijngaarden, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Laboratories
Editorial Areas
- Committees
- Chapters
- Conferences
- News & Events
- Lectures
- Review & Tutorial Articles
- Photos (and Media?)
- Awards
- Dissertations and Jobs
- Mailing Lists, Email Digest of Web Content
- IEEE Web Liaison
- "Fire Fighter"
Discussions
In addition to feedback on the above, the Online Committee welcomes input to its ongoing discussions , especially:
- Feedback on latest maintenance release?
- How the Standing Online Committee should be structured and interact with other Committees?
- Who can register on the new website?
- Terms and conditions of website use? Copyright issues?
- Announcements process?