IPPC Design Docs / Content Publising on www.ippc.int and other IPPC sites

Content Publising on www.ippc.int and other IPPC sites

Last updated: Thursday, 26 May 2011 at 12:07:34

This document describes some ideas and plans to publish existing IPPC data.

What data does the IPPC have?

• Tabular data found in spreadsheets, CSV, XML and other files
  • NPPO and RPPO contact info (contacts database)
  • Regulated pest lists
  • Requirements, restrictions and prohibitions (legislation?)
  • Pest names
  • Capacity development project descriptions / locations
• Date-sensitive written content (changes often, usually published in a time-based hierarchy with the latest information displayed first)
  • News articles
  • Pest reports
  • Events (calendar)
• Static written content (does not change often, usually of historical nature, such as the www.ippc.int About section))
  • ISPMs
  • Pages

What can we do to make our information sharing easier and more effective

Big up-front design strategy:

1. Have a discussion to find User and Secretariat needs and discuss the pros/cons of each tool to meet the needs
2. Discuss and define a content strategy:
   • key themes and messages,
   • recommended topics,
   • content purpose (i.e., how content will bridge the space between User needs and Secretariat requirements),
   • content gap analysis,
   • metadata frameworks and related content attributes, and
   • implications of strategic recommendations on content creation, publication, and governance.
3. Choose the tools to test, making sure the tool allows the publishing of information to a web-accessible area, public or restricted, as easy as possible, with as few clicks as possible
4. Write a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) describing the publishing workflow
5. Use dedicated, isolated servers to develop, configure and test the above tools before deployment to the production server

Agile strategy:

1. Have a brief discussion to find User and Secretariat needs. Ask what problems people are having, what annoys them, what takes a long time.
2. After settling on a few basic problems to tackle, for each problem, do the simplest possible thing that will possibly work to solve problem. From web development perspective this may mean building a new, simple tool or using an existing tool. Iterate and test until the problem is solved in the easiest manner and goals are completed by the user as easily as possible.
3. Develop/build tools without strict dependencies so that they can incorporated into other systems easily. I.e. From a programming perspective follow the Unix Philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Tools available for…

…Cleaning existing tabular data (data normalization)

• Google Refine - data cleaning, also known as ‘normalization’
  • Using freebase gridworks to create linked data
  • Hosting gridworks instances
  • Evaluate, clean and display open data

…Publishing tabular data

• Django - web development framework with automatic admin interface for creating, editing and sorting data
  • django-batchimport - batch import data from .csv files
  • Integrating with legacy (existing) databases and applications
  • Integrating with an authentication system
  • It’s possible to run a Django application on the same web server as an application powered by another technology.
  • Interacting with multiple databases
  • Using Django to design your database schema
• Drupal - CMS with focus on loose coupling of modules that do specific functions
  • User Import - import users into Drupal or update existing users with data from CSV files
  • Importing user records from another database into Drupal
• Google Fusion Tables - data management and publishing

…Creating and publishing written date-sensitive and static content

• Wordpress - weblog publishing system with comments, categories, tags, file and image attachments
• Custom weblog created with Django or Drupal such as the existing Mingus
  • Weblog tool should be able to automatically publish to social websites such as Twitter, Flickr and Facebook on a per-content item basis.
  • Content should be written in an easy-to-write, semantic, standard markup language such as Markdown

…Creating and collaborating on written content

• Google Docs - access and share documents from anywhere (including your own computer without internet connection), can export in a variety of formats including Microsoft Word and Excel. Dependent on third party.
• Etherpad - real-time document collaboration for groups of users, self-hosted, free and open source.
• Writeboard - simple, excellent, but third party
• System should support multiple-versions and track changes (diff/author comparison between two versions should be easily viewable).

Simon Griffee, simon.griffee@fao.org