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CoolThePlanet.net has gone into softlaunch. Feel free to browse around, add things, use things and generally kick the tyres.
If you find anything leave us a message here
We'll be rolling out a second site on the platform, hopefully by the end of the week.
As I mentioned earlier our developer Lars Pind has been running a quick discussion at his blog on how to address an interface problem. Here it is...
Our intranet is organised into a hierarchical structure, into which documents are placed. The hierarchy is extensible and flexible. In addition a document can appear in more than one section to improve findability and cut down on maintenance.
To add a document you just go to the section where you want it, click upload file (or similar) and add the document. User feedback says that this works just fine.
However at this stage it's possible to specify any additional sections you would like the document to appear in. For instance a report might be attatched to the board minutes where board members would expect to find it, and it might also reside in the pages of the campaign which produced it.
The difficulty comes with choosing these additional sections. At present a user is offered a list of all the sections (about 3000) and asked to choose. This doesn't work. the current question is how can we make it work better - and the discussion on Lar's site has produced lots of possible answers.
I thought I'd use this post to address a separate issue - why 3000 categories? The answer is that intranets I've worked on in the past have suffered from what I'll call 'gatekeeper syndrome'. Clear classifications were enforced with the result that only a few people would know where things were supposed to go. These people became responsible for 'putting things on the intranet' and as a result the site would stagnate as the gate keepers found better things to do.
The alternative was to give people the right to extend the system if they wanted it. So if a user can't find a place for a document they can just add it. The problem this brings is that the new sections are not necessarily added in a consistent way and the overall integrity of the structure suffers.
The web 2.0 solution to all this is links (which turns out to mean tags) - as suggested by Clay Shirky. The problem is that I've seen no evidence that tagging is something most web users understand, much less something that it would be easy to introduce to a global organisation (aside from a technology driven one). Our current approach is more web 1.1 (about where we were before the hype started) which was to plug in a search engine and insist on lots of meta data (which is a good thing anyway).
My current thinking is that there is no easy way out of this, beyond periodic tidyings of the hierarchy, providing guidelines about section naming / placement conventions and improvements in search technology. Those conventions are likely to be rooted in the 'worst practice' of filing things by which part of the organisation produced them. It's not what we're told is best practice, but it seems to be the instinctive user behaviour (this is our part of the intranet, on which we keep our documents).
Suggestions of other ways forward welcome...
We've got a lot of irons in the fire at the moment, which given that we're in the midst of holiday season may be a touch optimistic. Still, here's what we're up to...
We're very close to deploying not one, but two versions of our social networking platform Custard. Read about it on it's own blog.
We're working through some final glitches to switch our mass mailing over to Skylist's StormPost system. This will be accompanied by a new application codenamed Garlic, that will handle signing people up to mailing lists in the new system. It's been developed on our new platform of choice for small web applications (recent security scare not withstanding) - Ruby On Rails.
We're getting ready to deploy a vBulletin based discussion forum. Choosing a forum package is probably worth a blog post all in itself. The short version is that finding appropriate functionality wasn't hard - finding it in a package we were keen on from a technical point of view was.
We've got a major upgrade of Write-a-Letter ready to go as well, after which we'll probably make a bit of an effort to push this tool out to a wider community than just Greenpeace.
All that along with ongoing improvements to our intranet and content management system mean it's turning into a busy month. I'm optimistic that by the end of September we'll have a bunch of new stuff available to our campaigners on the ground, and that somewhere along the line that will translate into campaign victories...
As you'll notice from the product names above we're also moving away from building everything ourselves to taking as much off the shelf as we can. We're confident that this results in much better value for money, and means that when we do develop new tools it's for something of real value.
While doing yet more character set testing I came across Omniglot, a website that covers character sets, languages and writing systems for the past and present.
Most useful - sample text for all the languages. In this case my usual source didn't include Turkish.
Yes, we're the ones with an interface with 3000 check boxes (well 2952 to be precise). This is what happens when you follow Jakob Nielsens advice you see. Hierarchical dcument structures make sense he said - best way to organise your documents he said. Never had to file all Greenpeace's documents did he?
Although to be fair I think we can make this work - it's just this particular interface that's got out of hand.