Actually…

Last week we caught a tweet from @simond (Simon Dickson) about the launch of DFID’s new online consultation site.

The platform is a WPMU (WordPress MultiUser) site running an evolution of DIUS’ original Commentariat theme [UPDATE: apparently it's not an update of Commentariat, it's a custom theme that just shares a lot of the features of Commentariat; it'd be really useful to see a comparison of the two... I also wonder if the DFID theme is available under an open license?]. You can read more about the DFID platform on Puffbox. It’s really good to see WPMU embedded in government as a platform for consultations. Did WriteToReply have anything to do with that, we wonder? [UPDATE: apparently not - see the comments]

(Just as an aside: if you are, or are thinking of, running more than two WordPress sites under the same domain (actually, even different domains), then WPMU is a much better solution than a proliferation of single WordPress sites; as users of both, we can assure you that the step from WordPress to WPMU is tiny. It’ll take you just a half a day to understand how the WPMU platform works. Seriously… DISCLAIMER: errr, none; WordPress and WPMU are both free downloads, and we’re not on any sort of commission or payback!)

At some point, we need to do a side-by-side comparison of the CommentPress and Commentariat themes, not least so that we can provide a checklist for helping people decide which commenting theme best suits their document; but in the meantime, Steph Gray pointed out a few of the original Commentariat features in Introducing Commentariat & the POI Taskforce Report. If reading that post is still too much effort, the major difference to users is that CommentPress supports paragraph level comments, whereas Commentariat offers page level comments, and an arguably nicer navigation scheme.

Through working on JISCPress, an enhanced version of the CommentPress theme, we’ve started to tease out some principles that will guide our future work on the WriteToReply platform.

• Support paragraph-level commenting. Consultation documents are generally pithy, carefully worded documents. Allow readers the option of directing comments at specific points in the section rather than at the section as a whole.  The Institute for the Future of the Book have done research into online engagement with texts. It’s worth building on as Steph Gray did by including the scrolling comment box in the Commentariat theme.
• Document amplification: A government consultation document is not a destination site. By using a platform that is already syndicating chunked document sections on the web (e.g. through RSS syndication), exploit the fact that they’re no longer monolithic documents. Support ‘remote publishing’ through the use of embedded quotes sourced from your original consultation document. Leverage the web to allow people to take ‘ownership’ of the pieces of the consultation that matter to them. Most sites seeking widespread public engagement provide a means for embedding content elsewhere. Work being carried out as part of our open source JISCPress project will provide tools to republish paragraph level content in a variety of formats from a family of structured, unique URIs.
• Allow search engines to index your consultations: ‘robots, noindex, nofollow’ has no place in a public web-based consultation document.
• Remote commenting: Pulling in discussions from elsewhere on the web can be done by publishing a unique URI for each separate paragraph in a republished document. These unique URIs can be linked to from third party blog posts and microblog posts (e.g on Twitter) allowing remote conversations to refer to very particular parts of a document, and support the generation of linkbacks and remote comments back to an individual paragraph.
• Platform-wide benefits: There is no doubt that there are organisational benefits for institutions or government departments running their own consultation platform, as Simon outlines in his post. However, we also believe that there is a public benefit in hosting documents from multiple agencies on the same WPMU platform arising from platform-wide search, browsing, cross-linked related documents, thematic navigation and semantic tagging. By publishing government consultations on an open, web standards-based platform, the documents become open data.  One key feature of our work is to explore the extent to which content analysis and automated semantic tagging of documents hosted on the same platform can be used to automatically generate crosslinks between related documents. For certain document ecosystems, this feature may be used to support automated content discovery or recommendations about related content in other documents.
• Strength in re-use: We built WriteToReply on the CommentPress theme, in the same way that the DFID platform is built on the Commentariat theme. Our JISCPress project (another public-funded project) has in turn extended the CommentPress theme, not least in exploring the opportunities for content re-publication and third party quoting/embedding. We set up a JISCPress group to discuss our proposed extensions, and solicit further ones, so if there’s anything you like to see us working on over the next couple of months, please post your suggestions there. Remember, it’s an open source project so it’s code you can use for your own projects.

We’re very pleased to announce that JISC have agreed to fund JISCPress, a six-month, £32,500 project led by the University of Lincoln, in partnership with the Open University and based on WriteToReply. JISCPress will provide a scalable community platform for publishing and discussing project calls and final reports, in order to support the grant bidding and project dissemination processes.

As you may know, WriteToReply is run in our spare time – lots of late nights and busy lunchtimes. Since launching the re-publication of the Digital Britain – Interim Report, we’ve been looking for ways to bring benefits from our work on WriteToReply, into the Higher Education community where we work. JISC fund much of the UK development and innovation in the use of ICT in teaching and research and in March, announced their Rapid Innovations funding call.

We quickly re-published the call on WriteToReply to demonstrate the benefits of publishing funding calls in this way and then went on to submit a bid which proposed a community platform for the JISC funding call process, based on our experience of setting up and running WriteToReply. As with WriteToReply, this will be an open, public project and all documentation and code will be available under open licenses.

JISCPress is a platform aimed at people working in UK Higher Education, but the platform itself could be easily adapted for other uses, just as WriteToReply is primarily focused on government consultation documents. The final platform will be available as an Amazon Machine Image so anyone will be able to host their own multi-document discussion platform with all the benefits you see on WriteToReply plus the additional features we’ll be developing throughout this project. We’re already advocating the use the platform in our own universities for the open (and closed) discussion of institutional strategies, for the critique of texts by students and for peer-review of research papers. What might you use it for?

Over on the JISCPress project blog, you’ll find links to a mailing list, wiki and code repository. Feel free to join us if this WriteToReply spin-off appeals to you. If you know anyone that might be interested, please do let them know.

You’re probably already aware that WriteToReply uses WordPress Multi-User and CommentPress. Eddie Tejeda, the developer of CommentPress will be working with us on the project and this will result in significant further development of CommentPress 2. So, if you’re interested in WPMU and CommentPress (as many people are), please consider following, contributing to and testing JISCPress.

We should also note that while the project is a spin-off of our work on WriteToReply, neither Tony or Joss are personally receiving any funds from JISC.  The contributions from JISC to cover our time on this project are paid directly to our employers and does not result in any financial benefit to us or WriteToReply (which is in the process of being formalised as a non-profit business).  In other words, while WriteToReply is a personal project, JISCPress is part of our normal work as employees of our universities (both Tony and I are expected to routinely bid and win project funds – you get used to it after a while!). Money has been allocated to fund dedicated developer time to the project, which will pay Eddie and Alex, a student at the University of Lincoln, for their work as freelancers.

Anyway, on with the project! Here’s the outline from our original bid document:

This project will deliver a demonstrator prototype publishing platform for the JISC funding call and dissemination process. It will seek to show how WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) can be used as an effective document authoring, publishing, discussion and syndication platform for JISC’s funding calls and final project reports, and demonstrate how the cumulative effect of publishing this way will lead to an improved platform for the discovery and dissemination of grant-related information and project outputs. In so doing, we hope to provide a means by which JISC project investigators can more effectively discover, and hence build on, related JISC projects. In general, the project will seek to promote openness and collaboration from the point of bid announcements onwards.

The proposed platform is inspired and informed by WriteToReply, a service developed by the principle project staff (Joss Winn and Tony Hirst) in Spring 2009 which re-publishes consultation documents for public comment and allows anyone to re-publish a document for comment by their target community. In our view, this model of publishing meets many of the intended benefits and deliverables of the Rapid Innovation call and Information Environment Programme. The project will exploit well understood and popular open source technologies to implement an alternative infrastructure that enables new processes of funding-related content creation, improves communication around funding calls and enables web-centric methods of dissemination and content re-use. The platform will be extensible and could therefore be the object of further future development by the HE developer community through the creation of plugins that provide desired functionality in the future.

Subject to user requirements, our planned project deliverables are:

• A WordPress Multi-User based platform for authoring and publishing JISC funding calls in a form that allows paragraph-level comment and discussion either locally or remotely.
• A meta-site that aggregates all document data into a single site for search, navigation by categories and tags and can syndicate searches, tags and categories.
• Develop CommentPress to meet WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines, meeting public sector requirements.
• Evaluation and integration of “related content” utilities to dynamically link related project calls and reports based on content and/or semantic analysis.
• Evaluation and possible integration of remote, realtime messaging services such as Twitter and XMPP integration.
• Evaluation and possible integration of enterprise authentication services such as LDAP and Shibboleth.
• Evaluation and possible integration of OpenCalais, a semantic tagging service.
• Documentation on how to exploit the benefits of AWS and clone the project instance for other uses.
• A documented suggested workflow for document authors
• Documented examples of how to fully exploit the platform for data extraction and syndication.
• Documented ‘user stories’ for the JISC funding call process.

If this sounds interesting, please do take a look at the full project proposal and join us on the mailing list.