Functionality Specification re.

volution
An overview The challenge is to start developing an online network that provides peer to peer shared knowledge and learning opportunities coupled with tools and resources for leaders of arts organisations who are wanting to become more resilliant, enterprising and prepared for a game changing role in a sustainable 21st Century. As discussed the best way to develop a community it to stagger communication and the release of tools. With that in mind and the limited time frame and budget, we have broken the development down into two Phases. Phase One to be delivered within your original budget and Phase Two to be delivered pendin member feedback and further funding. ______________________________________________________________________

General demographic breakdown of users i. Leaders of Arts Organisations (Members) Over extended, under resourced leaders of arts organisations. Time poor, but extremely focused people, who have mixed opinions about the concept of arts organsisations becoming more resilliant by being more enterprising. They will need to quickly understand the concept of re.volution, easily stick their flag in the ground by signing up, understand the value of creating a profile and simply navigate to a specific topic or resource.

User maybe also be particularly interested in viewing individual case studies and examples of leading arts organisations that have successfully applied some of the tools and/or techiniques that are represented on the network. ii. Experts/Service Providers (Peers) Considered time poor (or their time can often be worth a lot of money) experts can be anyone from the above with a small amount of experience through hindsight all the way through to individuals from specialist areas who can volunteer or sell expertise on niche subjects. Service providers and consultants may want to offer a basic level of expertise for free on the network to help attract larger jobs that require paid for products and services. (The also may be potential sponsors of an entire network or particular section). ______________________________________________________________________

User roles/Back end admin area: There will be several levels of access, controlled by user roles with varying permissions: a) Anonymous This is the lowest level of access. Anonymous users will be able to read most content on the site (other than that which is restricted to signed-up users). However, they will not be able to comment, respond to discussions or start discussions of their own. b) Members Signing up can either be done via a dedicated user registration form (accessible via the header) or as part of the process of starting a discussion, wherein the user is prompted to enter their name and email address, and a profile is

automatically created for them on the site. Members are then able to participate fully in the website, including liking, rating, starting and responding to discussion

c) Peers Expert Peers are knowledge holders in any of the websites main categories. They have all the privileges of a normal signed-up user, and in addition they are tasked with overseeing the discussion in their assigned area of expertise (category or subject). Peers are either assigned that role by website administrators, based on prior arrangement, or they can apply for it as a normal signed-up member, by filling in a form in which they indicate the category for which they want to be an Expert, and a brief description of their qualifications. Experts will be vetted by a site administrator before having their new role assigned. d) Administrators Administrators have full access to the admin panel of the website content management system. They can administer users and content of all kinds, and have the ability to change any aspect of the site. Users with administrator access must be limited in number and must be aware that because they have the ability to cause damage to the site, they should have a very good technical grasp of the admin panel and how the different parts of it work. If it is deemed necessary, 2 levels of administrator can be created - one a Moderator-type role, giving the user power over site content but not other kinds of functionality (e.g. menus, modules), and a full Administrator role with the power to do everything. ______________________________________________________________________

Phase One:
Register an interest, create a profile and list yourself on a peer to peer network: The first challenge of the re.volution platform will be to communicate the overarching mission and gain stakeholder traction. Once this is established it needs to be easy for users to stick their flag in the ground, express an interest in the network and create a full profile. Once registered, users become members of the network and their profiles will be made accessible by other users in form of a simple members directory (a list view). Members will be able to browse other members and click their names to read their full details and access their contact information Currently the full member profile view is just a simple dashboard. When viewing their own dashboard, a member can edit their details such as their email address, why they joined and what they have to offer the network. Users will be able to tag themselves to using keywords that sum them up. This will aid the searching process and will need to be incorporated into the members directory. A users dashboard will also include a track functionality which allows users to see which pages have been visited in chronological order, grouped by page or by action performed. Case Studies Glossary & Toolkit area: A case study consists of a title and a text description which can be as long as needed. There will be an optional image to be displayed above the text, and several optional fields after the text which can be used to attach other media to the case study:

documents, spreadsheets, links, embedded video etc. Case studies will focus on telling the story of a particular project or piece of work in an illustrative way, and people searching the case studies could be looking for a general overview of something they are undertaking. A Tool withing the toolkit will be similar to a case study, will have a title and a text description, as well as a number of optional fields for attaching other content. However, with Tools the focus will be on providing educational materials in specific areas as a reference. Whereas a case study would typically include several media combined to tell a story, a Tool would more typically be a single item (such as an embedded YouTube tutorial, or a link to an external information source such as a website). People searching Tools are more likely to be looking for specific information that they need. Content can be linked to other content dynamically by referencing similar categories, subjects and tags. Content can also be linked to other content manually by using node reference, which allows a contributor or moderator to highlight relevant content by posting its url when submitting/editting something new/old - this content can be visualised on the page in a number of ways to be agreed at the wireframing stage. ______________________________________________________________________

Phase two:
Discussion forum A simple system for people of all technical abilities to start, respond, search and like discussions and rate responses around the various subjects represented on re.volution. To respond and interact with a discussions, users will need to leave at least an email address and name. This will then create a light weight user profile. Responses will have rich media enabled for the users to embed things like photos and videos in their

response. Site moderators can sign post people to relevant content to do with discussion by posting a link within a response themselves. Responses by peers and staff can be distinguished with a label and given a higher listing if required. Discussions will be clearly labelled with volume of responses to help users distinguish between useful content. The discussion section will be split into three key areas: i . Search Discussions To avoid duplication, the search existing Discussions function will be pushed heavily. At the top, just underneath a keyword search bar there will be a list of categories to allow the user to drill down to content as well as type a search term. Directly below this there will be a global list of all Discussions, with the option to sort content into the following order (any can be chosen as the default view by the site admin): a. most/least recent b. most/least useful/requested/asked c. most/least answered ii. Start a discussion A webform with two field where users can fill in a summary and more detailed breakdown of the discussion they wish to start. Next to the fields there will be tips to guide users how to start a good discussion and get a good response. iii. Join a discussion Although this is marked as its own section, it is in fact a duplicate of Search for discussions in i., just earmarked for the attention of experts as opposed for people looking for discussions - potentially with a different default view aimed at the expert audience.

iv. Leaving a mark on existing content There will be two ways a user can leave a mark on existing discussion based content a, Like a discussion b. Rate a response ______________________________________________________________________

Seminar/Webinars area A directory of events that can happen both online and offline. Like the member directory this data can have several views - teaser (list) view and a detailed (full) view, calendar view etc. Users could be given the ability to upload their own events which could publish immediately or be put in a queue for moderation. Only signed in users will be able to see the detailed (full) view and get details of the address and/or URL where the event is going to be hosted. The platform will not include the capabilties to run webinar in itself, but will link to a platform (paid for seperatly) of MMMs choice. We can recommend various off the shelf systems like Adobe Connect or help you source a custom platform by a partnering organisations who specialise in such technology. Next steps: There is a plethora of tools available. To help us find the right ones, that offer the right level of scalability coupled with simplicity and as much integration as possible, wed like to run through some questions and undertake some more research to consider all the tools available, whilst pushing ahead with the rest of the site. For example questions see appendix A ______________________________________________________________________

Blog/News feed: Standard multi-author blog, with usual functionality that allows MMM and certain members* of the network to contribute when selected/promoted by a site admin. Proactive: Blogging (complemented by a social media campaign) will be a major way for partners to stimulate new conversations around subject areas that they want to push. Reactive: Blogging will also be a live way to react to hot topics being discussed on the network. Taking a topic out of the Q&A forum and providing an authoritative summarising voice and a consolidated signpost. *The blog area can have multiple (even guest) authors, each one with their own tone of voice and specialism. Readers will be able to filter content by Author, Category and Tag (explained in the information architecture section) ______________________________________________________________________ Displaying Content: Drupal is a very flexible system that allows you to dynamically pull a display content such a titles, video, audio etc based on a variaty of criteria. For example what we call side panels or blocks can be created to show any number of the latest, most liked, most read content etc Establishing Groups Further down the line drupal allow users to form groups around a common subject, theme or event, which could lead to cluster of people working around a common goal or

project. This can be reviewed and scoped out at a later stage after spotting trends in user requirements - but we thought it would be good to flag this functionality now. Information Architecture: All information on the site will be categorised in several ways to enable easy searching and organization of content. a) Content Type There will be several different types of searchable content on the site: Case Study, Tools, Blog (News) Article, Discussions b) Category Each piece of content will fit into 1 single main category. c) Subject Optionally we can have subject. These will organized under the main categories. d) Tags Each piece of content can be tagged. Multiple tags can be assigned, and new tags can be created on the fly (as opposed to categories/subcategories which will not often change and cannot be added to except by a site administrator). ______________________________________________________________________

Search Several ways of searching content will be made available to users. a) Search box This is the most straightforward way of searching content, and will be present in the header of every page on the site. Users type in keywords they are interested in, and results will be returned from any content on the site that has been indexed for those keywords. Results will consist of a title linking to the content, and a brief excerpt from the beginning of the text.

b) Search Page This will be the fundamental tool for browsing the content on the site. The Search Page, without any filters applied, will return a list of all the website's content, from any content type, in any order desired (e.g. descending date order, ascending alphabetical order). The results will be arranged in a table-like presentation, will column names consisting of Title, Brief Description, Type, Date Posted, Category, and possibly other information (e.g. a legend indicating the type of content contained document, video, etc or usefulness rating and comment count) Clicking on column headings will enable the results to be sorted by that column. Results can also be filtered by keyword, category, tags, and any of the other columns that are included. Clicking on a search result row will bring the user to the selected content page. c) Top Content Lists These are small (5-10 results) content listings displaying top content either administrator picks, or top by votes, or top by number of comments whatever criteria are desired. They can be placed wherever needed for example, in a small section on the front page, or in a sidebar, or anywhere else. d) Featured Content Lists These are small (5-10 results) content listings displaying content site admin think is particularly interesting They can be placed wherever needed for example, in a small section on the front page, or in a sidebar, or anywhere else. e) Category Browsing Users can be presented with a list of the site's main categories, either as links or as a drop-down box. Selecting a category in this way will bring them to the main Search page, pre-filtered with their selection.

f) Subject Browsing The same functionality can optionally be presented for subcategories. This could be in combination with a category selection above, or stand-alone. g) Tag Browsing Various different methods of browsing tags can be offered. Users can view a tag cloud which is a graphical widget displaying the most popular tags. Alternatively they can view a static page listing the tags, either alphabetically or by popularity. They could also be presented with an autocomplete text box into which they type their selection. Once they have selected a tag they are brought to the main Search page pre-filtered by the tag. ______________________________________________________________________ Other Features: Some vital features of the site not mentioned above are covered in this section. a) Anti-Spam Its important to protect the site from spam, which may include fake account registrations, spurious comments and other forms of fake content creation. We propose using Mollom, a free online service that integrates with Drupal and protects against automated spam and, to some extent, non-automated (human) spam. This should protect against 99% of spam (100% protection is not possible). b) Update Notifications Drupal is a complex, open-source system and as such, new releases are frequent to both Drupal core and its contributed modules. It is highly advisable to stay up to date, at minimum with the important security-related releases, as otherwise the site could become vulnerable to attack. Notifications of available updates will be accessible to Administrators via the admin panel, but updates

should only be performed by developers, either on an ad-hoc basis or as part of a maintenance agreement. c) Extensibility Drupal is easily extended, and by building the site as described above it will be easy to add new pages and new way s of viewing and searching content as and when necessary. If the amount of information on the site becomes very large then it may be necessary to revisit the category system, consolidate and manage tags, etc, and Drupal makes this quite easy for trained users. d) Search Engine Optimization Page titles, URLs and meta tags will be set up to be built automatically in a way that is friendly to search engines. By default all content will be accessible to search engines. If certain keywords or keyphrases are important to focus on for search engine results these should be decided upon before go-live. e) Performance The sites performance (i.e. speed) can be increased significantly by employing a caching system, whereby the most frequently-accessed pages are cached as pure HTML so that they can be served up quickly to end-users. The server then updates these pages with any new content on a periodic basis. The result is a large increase in the perceived speed of the site, with the trade-off that new content may not appear in the search listings for a certain specified period of time (1 hour is suggested). Alternatively caching can be set to the minimum, with the result that search pages are always up-to-the-minute, but pages may load more slowly and heavy pages (e.g. the Search Page) will be more taxing on the server. f) Analytics The site will have google analytics installed.

Appendix A Example questions: 1. How many webinars do you expect to run per month/year? 2. How frequent would they be? 3. How many participants do you estimate there would be on average 4. Do you want to: i. run/film/record the presentations/webinars using internal resources ii. run/film/record the presentations with third party help iii. want network members to run/film/record the presentations/webinars themselves. 5. When a speaker is presenting what format will his/her presentation typically be in... eg. Audio, Video, Powerpoint/PDF slides etc 6. What classroom tools do you need for the shared learning eg. audio Chat, instant messaging, video conference, whiteboards, document sharing, download, recording, social media plugins, etc