[Hamara-devel] stakeholders in our web presence

[shirish]

addition at bottom :-

On 05/22/2015 09:42 PM, shirish wrote:
> 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.

While browsing the web, came across this :-

https://panzi.github.io/SocialSharePrivacy/

or/and

https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff

these would be good implementations to follow -

make sure our users are able to share while at the same time make sure 
that big brother cannot watch at our expense.

-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org