[Hamara-devel] stakeholders in our web presence

[shirish]

Hi all,

Warning - This will be a long read, sorry.

Let's clear the board for the moment, think we have no website, no web 
presence and on behalf of what we know as of now and some assumptions 
let's see who the stakeholders would be for the web presence/website 
part of things. But even before we get to that stage, we need to 
ascertain who we are. The more I see the tools and the depth they have 
for learning and creativity, it becomes clearer that we are a company 
who would be using and offering OER (Open Educational Resources) , most 
of them digital tools on the system but also a few which might be online 
in nature (this is a derivation from my previous stand.)

Some of the stakeholders would be :-

a. Mr./Ms. X - people we don't know why they came to site
b. Teachers
c. Students
d. Parents
e. School Management
f. Friends or/and people who know people from either of the groups above.
g. Home-schoolers
h. Authors.
i. Upstreams
j. Downstreams
k. Developers
l. Us

Note - I am sure there is/might be missing a few stakeholders as well.

Now once we know who the different stakeholders are (apart from Mr./Ms. 
X let's try to define what they would be coming to the site for. )

b. Teachers - If we use moodle as a paedological tool, while the tool 
itself is bare-bones but is a canvass which can be filled by us. There 
is tremendous power there for critical analysis of education being 
imparted to students, how much the students are grasping and things like 
that than ever before. The tool is obviously as good as people who are 
using it and designing it. At the very basic level, teachers could use 
it to provide attendance sheets, results of tests, exams, competitions, 
assignments to students and so on an so forth.

c. Students - Students should be able to access our repository, do 
assignments, share all and any accomplishments with their friends, chat 
between themselves and so on and so forth. All of this activity would 
give us tremendous insight as to how the student perceive our offering 
and what gaps are which we need to improve upon. Along with school/s we 
could also make competitions and winning entries could be shown on our 
website. Sharing an example below :-

An interesting competition would be to have a blender 2-5 minute 
animation competition. Imagine a 12 or a 14 yr. old kid learning what 
all it takes to make an animation of 2-5 minute. S/He would be learning 
about refraction of light and how light falls and bends around objects, 
s/he would learn about camera angle movement, learn about shadows, 
particle and object collision, particle physics, vertices, extrusions, 
number of polygons and how that would affect the look and feel of the 
model and so on and so forth. S/He would also be unconsciously 
understand the various trade-offs that an animation studio has to make 
as choices in order to complete an animation within some budget and 
time-frame. Apart from that the single most accomplishment would be how 
to tell a story, what may look or feel good in the head might be too 
complicated. There is a reason why Big Buck Bunny resonates with so many 
people so easily than many feature-length animation movies.

Now we could showcase the top 5/top 10 movies which were selected at the 
competition and also let them work on it even after the competition so 
they can continue improving on it or/and trying out different ideas on 
the same topic. All of this would also go out on various social media 
platforms.

Another one would be using tex to make presentations. I don't really 
wanna go in there because the possibilities are just endless.

Just need people who are passionate about FOSS and can share it with 
students.

d. Parents :- Parents would like to see how their wards are doing. 
Depending on the site's scalability and bandwidth, they could access 
reports on how the child is faring and where s/he needs to improve 
either academically or in extra-curricular activities.

e. School Management - Most school managements do not get enough 
feedback either from parents, students or teachers as to which areas 
they need to improve upon. Using our analytical tools might help them to 
make more informed decisions which will improve life both for everybody 
concerned.

f. Friends/colleagues of students/teachers :- They obviously would be 
interested in going to certain areas only and not the overall website. 
The friends would be for all above and below as well.

g. Home-schoolers - Like world-over, there is also a growing trend of 
home-schoolers in India as well. These are dynamic individuals who feel 
they are able to help their wards much more via home-schooling rather 
than sending to schools. Whatever might be their philosophy, it is known 
that they also have lot of insights into working with children as well 
as much more open to digital tools than those in schools. It could be 
also used as a networking and knowledge-base to connect with 
home-schoolers + educators each learning from one another.

h. Authors - We could also provide services where latest 
studies/surveys, articles and events calling educators and other experts 
to write and publish on our platform  which could be disseminated to 
schools as well as peer-reviewed open access journals as well.

i. Upstreams - All the tools that we would be using would be looked at 
interests, in part due to it being used in a developing country which 
also means we would be under a bit more scrutiny than others.

j. Downstreams - At some point of time, there would be a need to offload 
responsibilities to other people as we get more understanding and need 
to manage all the different levels of continuous deployment, upgrade, 
maintenance, the works.

k. Developers - As the site usage and various tools usage grows, we 
would need all kinds of developers, from application developers who 
would help polish or add functionality to tools which would be passed 
onto upstream to polishing our own implementation.

l. Us - We would need to monitor and analyse different parts of the 
website as well as offline digital engagements with the different 
stakeholders and use that analysis to improve upon our offering 
continuously.

Now that we have defined the different players and their roles how do we 
now cater to all these different people ?

One word answer to it, single sign-on.

We have seen how single sign-ons are used in various web services, we 
could use the same services to show and hide various facets of the 
website which would be of use to them.

This also means there would be lot of integration to be done in the 
website itself. All the different tools such as wordpress, bugzilla, 
IRC, mailing list would all have to shed their unique looks and be part 
of hamara web-site. While we love all these different software and their 
unique looks, it probably would make much more sense if they feel it's a 
seamless experience within the site.

Add to this moodle and perhaps youtube or some video streaming website 
along with presentations etc.

Apart from that, there would be more 'authors' than just us. So we would 
need to make them as easy as possible. While the blogs would be a good 
place to start, as time goes on, there would be other areas which might 
need multiple authors (other than us), so for authoring it would need to 
be good-looking and easy to work with.

There may be weekly, monthly newsletter that would need to be curated 
and sent to individual schools as well and maybe a quarterly or 
something to all the schools who are part of hamara.

I know what I have detailed is much more than just "mere" CD/DVD 
deployment but the reality is we would need to be much more engaged with 
all the actors who are in this.

We would also need to constantly re-assure teachers that we are not 
undermining them in anyway and constantly help them to assess their own 
skill-sets and help them where they feel they are wanting.

If people feel that liferay is upto all these tasks then go ahead with 
that. I only worry that the website may not be able to do all that we 
might want it to do. Downtimes should be on Saturday or Sunday for any 
maintenance work and be up from Monday to Friday/Saturday as the school 
is.

At the very last, the .iso image should be on the front page of the 
site, not at some page called Downloads with preferably the 64-bit 
version at the top, a .torrent/magnet link below that and a link to 
other releases which will take to the Download page which has all the 
releases. See the ITunes website for presence. I do understand that 
there is a cost to bandwidth here. We could also act as a shop which 
does paid CD/DVD services for people as well with manual or two along 
with it (either in e-book or dead tree format).

I hope I have shared my vision. While the first step is obviously to 
start with the CD/DVD part, there would be much more interaction needed 
if we are to derive value from it at every stage.

And I haven't even talked about 'stickiness' of the website and other 
issues at all.

Look forward to feedback.
-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org