Re: Workspace vs Projects (WAS Re: Forums)

Thanks for the comments, I think that in fact I agree with you in a general 
sense.  I believe that I could make this fly, if the discussion area within 
the projects were to be threaded...although some other things might make my 
job of convincing/training NA users easier.   

The reason I said this :

> > believe that having threaded discussions, will perhaps eliminate some of
> > the other issues altogether or will at least be a good start at more
> > narrowly defining where things should go.

is because, of what you are saying below.  I could great general projects and 
then discussions with varying numbers of people could occur by following 
particular threads.  But the basic fact is that if I group (in my case) at 
the level of what this grant calls a project, there will be alot of users 
involved in hightly different areas of the project and they don't want to 
view ALL of the information.

I am finding this a little bit difficult to describe abstractly, so I'm going 
to describe the project a little bit more specifically to illustrate it 
better.  By doing this I expect one of two things to happen, 1) some one says 
oh thats what you want to do, you can do that fairly easily by doing X, or 2) 
people will say ah, I see what he is trying to say now.

Recently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) created a biodefense 
research network, that are commonly called the Regional Centers of Excellence 
(RCE).  Each of these regional RCE's is made of many universities, government 
partners, and in some cases corporate entities.  I would estimate that there 
are around 500 individuals working on this projects either as researchers at 
any level (lab technician to full professor) and administrators (either at 
individual instituions, the particular regions lead, or the NIH).  It could 
be even higher than this.

Representatives from each of these regional centers have been taskes with 
implementing a collaborative scheme that increases communications not only 
within the regional center, but also communications between researchers and 
administrators at different rce's.  

Thats the high level view of what we are trying to accomplish.  Now, at a 
lower level you have the research project structure.  For example, in my 
region, we have six major projects, Anthrax, Emerging Viruses, Poxvirus, 
Tularemia, Enteric Pathogens, Public Health Response, in addition to three 
core facilities.  Each of these projects in turn might have 3 or more 
subprojects (unrelated to each other in some cases other than they may work 
on the same pathogen).  Of course each of these sub projects have tasks that 
must be accomplished.  

Now, from a "regional" perspective, grouping conversations within a project or 
a subproject might be appropriate and manageable.  However, we are trying to 
induce communication accross rces, which may have overlapping projects.  For 
example there are a few different regions with "Anthrax" projects.  These 
individual groups will need to manage their projects and the set of tasks 
that they are to accomplish, but we also want to encourage cross-polination 
of ideas.    You can look at our site to see this structure if you want, 
http://marce.vbi.vt.edu

Ideally I think it might be nice to see it work like this:

NIH defines some workspaces for very highlevel general areas (ie, Anthrax).  
Within that workspace the individual projects from different RCE's are 
created and managed by their respective PI's.  The research groups working on 
a specific project would have discussions within their project, and 
discussions between different projects would occur in the workspace area.  If 
these discussion are threaded, it makes it easy for users to have divergant 
discussion without creating whole new projects for that discussion.

Does this make anything clearer for anyone or just make it even more cloudy?

Dustin


> Forgive me for being presumptouse and assuming to understand your setting,
> but one way of looking at the problem is as follows:
>
> - threaded discussion are a definite requirement/wish list item, no
> argument there..:)
> - is not the entire OGo install a common workspace as most functions have a
> very fine gained authorization scheme between single and multiple shared
> access.
> - if you agree with the notion then perhaps a second element to consider is
> that each "project" can be linked to a separate dialogue box on the left
> side bar that can be activated by the user or preset by the admin. This
> links drops users via one click directly into a specific "project" and by
> setting the default view (again either at the user level or admin level)
> you could get pretty close to what you are looking for, threaded discussion
> aside.
>
> See: Prefences>Projects>Search Projects (*) to get a listing, then add the
> appropriate project and it will appear in a separate left side box on the
> main view. Now adjust the default view for that project to whatever you
> want. With the appropriate permissions it becomes a valuable shared or
> group resource. Call the project for demo purposed "workspace"
>
> Hope that helps
>
> /ch

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