07MeetingTwenty

05/23/2007 Wednesday

• Today's session at 10am is the last one for this spring fest. Note will be sent out to teachers thanking them and the students for participating.
• How can we open the environment up more to users? What requirements would that put on the development work?
• Some reflections on use of the environment
  • We need better access to information on what happened in wiki and chat room. In the current system, you can't see what's been happened in the room unless getting into.
  • Need some kind of social networking mechanism to help people find each other and do work together. For example, be able to find people you have chatted with before, or rooms you have been into.
  • One big issue of this spring fest is time people are available to meet.
• Some ideas of improving the environment:
  • Build better profiles in the lobby and wiki and make better use of them; incorporate the function of buddies/friends; invitation/messenging - these three are for linking individuals
    • How to make current messaging function work better?
      • Coupling with email?
      • multiple access from "see who's online" and "view profile"?
      • better organize the list of recipients
  • Tagging - to provide better access to content (e.g. of rooms)
  • Create a space for interest group or whiteboard for public annoucement
• Some other problems
  • Under different topics there are rooms with the same name: if a user is in two of these rooms, 'who's online' only displays one room - need to redefine the room name so it can distinguish
  • User should be able to define groups ad hoc and do networking
  • Easier navigation through different communities
  • Need to create connections between people by e.g. cateogries of things you're interested in, time available
• The current system (including lobby, chat rooms, wiki) is quite complex. Would adding more feature add the complexity? - so far, students in spring fest had little problem orienting and using the system (though they haven't used wiki much). it might be that by adding some features and improving some existing ones, it will be easier to use and reduce the complexity on user's side.
• One approach to open the environment up more is to target on some specific users of the Math Forum and develop the functions for that scenario.
• More discussion on new functions or improvement of current ones:
  • Create new topic, community, create a room with specifying URL for different tabs
  • Create a wiki page where users can advertise what their interests are and available time
  • Create a new room: can user also create a new topic during this process? User should choose a subject before choosing an existing topic
  • Search function: the ability to search for rooms and people is postponed on the development agenda. At some point, this needs to be implemented especially when the list gets long.
  • Monitoring activities in the rooms: can notification be sent by email about the activity of a room for administrative purpose? It is quite hard for moderators to follow what's going on.
• Summary of operational items defined at this meeting:
  • Integration of creating new topic with creating new room
  • Creating a grouping room and associated wiki page
  • Improving messaging so people can actually use it (including the refreshing issue, list of recipients, multiple access)
  • Administration page - need to create the password for it, hide room flag, change room ID to room name
  • Timeout issue in lobby
  • Duplicate room names - need to enforce a rule to create the room name to distinguish
• The new player and administration page have been up. Murat will send out details.