Scientific Collaboration
with Plone:
A Case Study
Sally Kleinfeldt
Plone Symposium East 2009

Background
• Collaboration site for Advancing Green
Chemistry
• Fall 2008 Jazkarta project
• Me? I’m an ecologist...

Overview
• Organization
• Opportunity
• Solution
• Lessons

Organization
• AdvancingGreenChemistry.org
• Mission: promote development and
adoption of Green Chemistry
• Shift away from an economy dependent on
toxic chemicals
• “...design molecules with an eye to
consequences right from the start...”

Opportunity
• Build collaborative connections between
• Green Chemistry
• Environmental Health Sciences
• Sciences that operate within strict
disciplinary boundaries
• Common thread: how chemicals interact
with biological systems

Problem
• How to create collaboration where there is
none? How to orchestrate joint:
• Conferences
• Papers
• Policy development

Solution
• A private website that provides a safe,
trusted environment for members to
discuss ideas that might be controversial in
mainstream venues

Solution
• Website features:
• Invited members
• Relevant news, papers, bibliographies
• Wiki-like collaboration areas
• Discussion forums

Plone Features Well
Suited to Problem
• Secure document sharing
• Rich pages, news, events, calendars
• Wiki behavior
• Commenting
• Related content
• Member areas

Add-on Products
Provide The Rest
• Discussions (PloneBoard)
• Integrated news feeds (FeedFeeder)
• Bibliographiies (CMFBibliographyAT)
• Papers, summaries (Easy to create
custom content types)

The Site
• Home page with portlets for news,
members, discussion posts, announcements

Members
• Browse and search members
• Portlet for most active members (based on
count of content)
• Portlet for most recent members

Member Profiles
• Extra fields (projects, affiliations...)
• Member area preconfigured to contain
bibliography and papers (custom type)

The Science
• Primers on Green Chemistry and
Environmental Health Sciences
• Summaries of papers (custom type)
• “Wiki” behavior on some sections
• Admin controls on sharing tab

News
• Featured news items added to site
• Two RSS feeds imported with FeedFeeder
so searchable on site
• To improve merged display without needing
a custom view, Ross Patterson created
collective.subcollectionview - provides new
layout for sub-collections

Discussions
• Implemented with PloneBoard
• Not much activity

Ad Hoc Collaborations
• New area created during conference
• Notes, ideas, policy documents
• Responding to opportunity presented by
new administration

Results
• November conference - 30 invited experts
• One week after election - change of
administration offered a huge opportunity
• Used site to quickly prepare succinct policy
statement, presented to key people
• Now working on scientific consensus
statement, group has ownership of site

Lessons Learned

What do Scientists
Need?
• Secure, private areas for data, discussions -
with control over access
• Places to share
• Grey literature
• Bibliographies
• Information about papers published
elsewhere (respecting copyright)

What do Scientists
Need?
• Collaboration spaces for joint authoring
• Too much passing documents via email -
who has the latest?
• Support for all levels of web savvy

What’s Easy in Plone
• Features largely meet the needs
• Custom content types for specific uses
• Everyone gets WYSIWYG editing

What’s Hard in Plone
• Getting users started
• Shifting from uploading docs to editing
pages
• Training required for some things
• Folder structure, information architecture
• Collections, portlets, how to set up
sharing

What’s Hard in Plone
• Getting a new discussion forum off the
ground...
• Commenting on content is easier to
instigate and should work better

Tips for Success
• Keep it simple and focussed
• Develop iteratively - they won’t know what
they want until they’ve seen it
• Set up site structure ahead of time (generic
setup)
• Set up structure of Member areas too
(event handler)

Tips for Success
• Train a site admin who will personally
mentor the scientists (especially on
bibliographies)
• Beware adding features that will complicate
migrations - bad for customers and gives
Plone a bad name

Tips for Success
• Beware of ambitions for discussion forums,
social networking features
• Unlikely to be successful at small scales
• Focus on what Plone is good at - content
management

Questions, Discussion?