CUNY Academic Commons

In the pipeline.

Name: I agree that "Group Wiki" might be confusing. Here are some other possibilities:
WriteSpace
Writeboard (taken from Basecamp)
ShareSpace
Collaboration Space
Whiteboard

Placement: I'd say that it should be a link on the Group nav bar, with all of the other group-related links. And that, if possible, it work as an iframe so that it can be set within the regular group interface. If it would be better, on a coding level, not to use iframes, we could explore other possibilities.

Features: export as PDF/doc is a great idea, as is a revision history. Other ideas:
-- export to Group Documents section of Group
-- email to all users
-- notify members of changes w/checkboxes to select recipients (with one of them being "others who have edited this doc")
-- I'd look at the Writeboard on Basecamp, since it pretty much has exactly what we want

Other thoughts? Responses?

Good suggestions. Not sure if I understand why you want an iframe. Wouldn't it be better to actually have it integrated? Or are you assuming we do this outside of WP?

No, I'm just being ignorant. All I meant is that it would be best if it could be incorporated directly into the page within the existing design. For some reason, I thought that would necessitate an iframe.

Conceptually I wonder whether people really want a wiki or more of a collaborative document editor? Functionally they're pretty much the same but, for me at least, a wiki is more about growing a knowledge base, a series of informational pieces that can be edited and linked to each other. With a wiki info is generally created on and seen all in one place and all documents pretty much look the same. A document editor is more focused on getting a single written and then it is moved somewhere else for viewing. There is more focus on visual design and being able to incorporate media. Each document is unique.

Eventually there may be room for both, My guess is that most groups as they are now want the document editor. If that is true ( maybe it isn't) then Then a wiki tool named more like a doc editor may have them asking for more and more document editing features. So I think how we present the functionality and what people expect to be able, or not able, to do with it is important.

The related issue on the technical side is what code base are we going to use for this? It doesn't seem like we have time to totally blue sky it and create whatever we want. Is there a collaborative doc editor that is even a possibility or is it just wikis?

Chris, I like your way of conceptualizing it in terms of a collaborative space rather than a repository. I think you're right that 'wiki' has tones of the latter for those whose knowledge of wikis is limited to Wikipedia.

Technically, I'm assuming that we'll use WordPress itself on the back end. There is already a plugin for BuddyPress called Group Wikis http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-group-wiki/. Right now it works in a suboptimal way, by creating new blogs for each group that wants a wiki, and using WP's built-in post revisions to act as a revision history. I know from conversation with the author that it's being rewritten to take advantage of custom post types in WP 3.0 so that this suboptimal database setup will be skirted.

In any case, even if we don't want to use that plugin (I haven't used it much so I don't know how it is - but I do know that the author has a demo site at namoo.co.uk that you might sign up for and play around with), we could develop something similar for our own needs that runs on custom post types. In theory it's a pretty straightforward thing to do, given that we would have access to the entire stable of WP features (post revisions, commenting, rich editors, taxonomies, template tags and loops, etc).

We could also try to embed some other service, such as Etherpad. That would be extremely cool but I have no idea how hard it would be to rope it into BuddyPress. It'd take a good deal of investigation before any development could begin.

I really like the idea of embedding something like Etherpad as a collaborative tool and think that groups would welcome the idea across the board. We could encourage groups to use that as a starting space, then move content over to a private/public group blog and eventually a public wiki. As Boone said I'm not sure how easily it would integrate to BuddyPress, but I think it's worth investigating.

I also like the idea of Etherpad. A couple of thoughts/issues on that are 1. It steps out of the Wordpress focus that the Group Wiki plugin keeps (this could be a good thing and maybe we need a larger discussion of how WP dependent we want to be) 2. It will require an unknown but probably significant amount of development. Something that Etherpad gives that a Group Wiki wouldn't is the simultaneous editing (or at least I think so, let me know if that's wrong Boone). I'm not sure that's a dealbreaker, but there does need to be some way to manage multiple people editing the document at the same time (as may happen when a deadline is approaching).

For now it does seem like the Group Wiki option will be the path of least resistance.

WOW-this is HUGE, for us and for BP more generally. Can't wait to check it out!