4. 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...”
5. 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
6. Problem
• How to create collaboration where there is
none? How to orchestrate joint:
• Conferences
• Papers
• Policy development
7. Solution
• A private website that provides a safe,
trusted environment for members to
discuss ideas that might be controversial in
mainstream venues
8. Solution
• Website features:
• Invited members
• Relevant news, papers, bibliographies
• Wiki-like collaboration areas
• Discussion forums
9. Plone Features Well
Suited to Problem
• Secure document sharing
• Rich pages, news, events, calendars
• Wiki behavior
• Commenting
• Related content
• Member areas
10. Add-on Products
Provide The Rest
• Discussions (PloneBoard)
• Integrated news feeds (FeedFeeder)
• Bibliographiies (CMFBibliographyAT)
• Papers, summaries (Easy to create
custom content types)
11. The Site
• Home page with portlets for news,
members, discussion posts, announcements
12.
13. Members
• Browse and search members
• Portlet for most active members (based on
count of content)
• Portlet for most recent members
14.
15. Member Profiles
• Extra fields (projects, affiliations...)
• Member area preconfigured to contain
bibliography and papers (custom type)
16.
17.
18. 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
19.
20.
21. 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
25. Ad Hoc Collaborations
• New area created during conference
• Notes, ideas, policy documents
• Responding to opportunity presented by
new administration
26.
27. 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
29. 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)
30. 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
31. What’s Easy in Plone
• Features largely meet the needs
• Custom content types for specific uses
• Everyone gets WYSIWYG editing
32. 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
33. What’s Hard in Plone
• Getting a new discussion forum off the
ground...
• Commenting on content is easier to
instigate and should work better
34. 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)
35. 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
36. 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