Ryan Sholin did a review of Aardvark, Hunch, and Quora today on IdeaLab. I like his points at the bottom so much that I want to record them in perpetuity:
- From Aardvark, we learn the value of reaching people wherever they are, however they consume and communicate information. Push notification on my iPhone during my commute home? Sure, I consume information that way.
- From Hunch, we learn that if we hand a person a multiple choice quiz, we can record the results and let our algorithm learn something about them to bring to the table when they ask their next question.
- From Quora, we learn the value of frictionless real-time interfaces. Don’t assume your application has to follow patterns generated by its predecessors. You’re building next year’s tools, not last year’s.
All three together? Mmm… delicious.
After Daniel outlined the basic models that will be used in the profile pages for the Connection Engine I drew up some rough wireframes. The first is a basic user profile page for an individual. The aim is to mesh contact information and the challenges the individual is putting into the system.
The second is a profile view for a news organization. Similar to the user view this would bring together contact information as well as support history for the news organization as a whole.
Any feedback, critiques, or ideas are completely welcome.
As I mentioned yesterday, the first set of models I’m working on are for the People and Organization applications. I’m going to outline them here so that Andrew can put together basic wireframes for how the information will be structured on the view. We’re going for a basic profile view where the contact information is one part and the activity stream is the other part.
I’m adding the type of field the data is for the edit view. Users will be able to edit their own profiles and the organization profiles they are the administrator for. CoPress admins will be able to edit any profile and any organization profile.
People – Profile model extends the Django User model and includes:
- First name (text field)
- Last name (text field)
- Date created
- Position (text field)
- Organization (foreign key to an existing organization within the system)
- Phone (dropdown with multiple options and ability to add multiple phone numbers)
- Email (dropdown with multiple options and ability to add multiple phone numbers)
- IM (dropdown with multiple options and ability to add multiple phone numbers)
- Websites (dropdown with multiple options and ability to add multiple phone numbers)
- Address/Location (multiple text fields)
- Photo (uploaded file
- Bio (multi-line text field)
Organization model includes:
- Name
- Date created
- Slug (unique)
- Summary (multi-line text field
- Websites (same as People profile
- Email (ditto)
- Phone (ditto)
- Address
- Photo
The organization view will also have a list of staff depending on which users in the system have the organization in their profile. The user’s position and photo in the staff view will be pulled from their personal profile. Lastly, every object in the system will have the ability to be tagged with various topics. Clicking on fields like Location and Position will produce a filter view where you can see all of the People or Organizations with that piece of metadata.
Just a brief update from me right now. I may write more later if I have more time to work on it. Basically, what I’ve been doing for some amount of time today is trying to abstract the first level of functionality we want for the Connection Engine into different applications, and then defining the models for each application. Here’s what I’m thinking for the base level of functionality:
- Challenge and Solution – In some senses, this is the support ticketing mechanism. I want to move away from the support ticketing paradigm and instead focus on having well defined “Challenges” leading into documentation of the steps to produce a “Solution.” Once the Challenge reaches the Solution stage, then the tread is closed. A user can spin off a new Challenge from a closed one, however, that will create a relationship between the two.
- Profiles for People and Organizations – I’d like to duplicate a lot of the base-level functionality that Highrise offers us currently such that we can tie it closer to the Challenge and Solution functionality.
- Invoice and finance management – Basic accounting software that ties into the Profiles application and builds upon what Albert is already working on.
I’m focusing on the Profiles first, and it’s actually going to be two applications initially: People and Organizations. My goal is to define the models for the first, get them to validate, and then build the models for the second. Once I progress further on that, I’m going to start on HTML mockups that will provide a foundation for starting to work on the logic.
With this post, I also want to articulate a couple of issues worth solving at some point with this application. Well, couple of issues that are different sites of the same bigger one of communication. It’s about documenting the work that’s being done with any given project in such a fashion that both the person doing the work and the client have a really good sense of what’s going on. Having an experience for this will allow the client to submit a Challenge/support ticket, see that we’ve opened it and are working on it, read through the work we’ve done to resolve it, and then reference it later if they have an additional question about it. I think a highly-structured work log as a part of the Challenge to Solution process will be very important as we scale the number of projects we’re working on and need to have memory of what was done when for when the inevitable questions about it come later.
Asked a couple of days ago. This is exactly the type of bridges we want to be making because we are hosting campus magazines too that probably have really valuable advice. One big question is how you make these bridges more intuitive; right now it requires one of us knowing the right person to connect the asker to and shooting them an email. Related to this, I think it might be wise to start thinking about a good taxonomy for Highrise. It will be a system we have to maintain but we can quickly find the right person by topic.
I’m headed to West Palm Beach, Florida on Monday for a week to hang out with DJ Strouse and Casey Stark while building cool things with Django, aka work on the Connection Engine. Casey put together a project blog and I’ll probably post updates there, here, on the blog, and on my own blog. To start things off, however, I gave them a short introduction to the ideas behind the Connection Engine.
From a Google Group I joined recently:
If you plan on using bayesian categorization, i would suggest ruinning the raw text through a Shannon Information theory-like filter to identify the most relevant words in a text. With even a mild cut on the relevancy you can reduce the index size while increasing the overall quality of the matches…. and all this would be language-independent.
Regarding the tagging as trusted or not trusted: having trusted editors is always good, but then you risk not being able to scale, and to be attacked for enforcing a left/right/religious/atheist/whatever point of view. What I would love to see is a system that correlates info,a and then lets users understand it. For example: I have A, B, C, D, and E submitting reports. A, B and C tell me that the sun is yellow and the grass is green, D tells me that the sun is red and the grass is blue, E tells me that the sun is red and grass is yellow. The system will cluster A, B, C, and give me a value that determines the cluster veracity as a function of the veracity of the 3 people submitting the reports, while it shows that D agrees mildly with them while E doesn’t on any point. As as user, I can see a computed veracity that will point me to the most likely truthful reports, but if I know for a fact that the grass in that region is yellow, as E states, then maybe I will trust E more than the others. This system would offer several advantages: besides lowering the challenge of identifying experts on the field in a short time, it would show who departs more often from the truth, and allow users to choose their “side” of the truth, while being aware of other points of view.
No specific thoughts on how this applies to the Connection Engine yet… I just wanted to record it to reference at a later point.
The overall intent of this document is to provide a set of goals for CoPress to steer itself towards in the last three months of 2009. These goals presented as milestones encompass the entirety of our operations, and will give us more specific criteria for determining whether we’re scaling like we’d like to. In short, benchmarks to determine whether we’re on course with where we want to be. At the beginning of 2010, we’ll be able to look back upon this, critically reflect, and define plans for the first six months of the new year.
Managed Hosting
Scaling Managed Hosting, currently our primary business and project for expanding the market, is a top priority for fall 2009. We’re shooting for 75 Managed Hosting clients launched or signed and started with sandboxes by the end of fiscal year 2009.
Getting potential clients to commit to switching during the school year might present some difficulty. One strategy will be to convince them of the merit of working on the redesign for a couple of months, and then relaunching their site over winter break 2009. Most student newspapers should be able to make the transition successfully in that period. With adequate planning, the launches will be within the scope of our abilities and we’ll be able to handle their archives as they come and as our resources allow.
Continue reading ‘Strategic goals and benchmarks for last quarter 2009′
I’m messing around more than anything else (which is a bad thing because I have a draft for a pub’d essay due tomorrow evening that I haven’t started on). Miles and I were talking tonight, and I came up with an idea on how we could use the Connection Engine for client education. Listen to the audio boo.
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