CUNY Academic Commons

Starting a new ticket here related to http://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/2736

It used to be that members could create links around terms of interest in their profiles that, when clicked, would lead to the member directory and show everyone else who shared those interests. This was important for our project because it helped fulfill our goal of connecting people across campuses who had shared interests.

Now that we have disabled auto-linking of interests from the profile page (with the logic that it is a presentational, outward-facing page rather than one that is network-focused), we should think about how to surface network connections among members. I have a few ideas in mind:

1. Make the academic interests on the people directory ( http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/members/ ) linkable, so that people could search through and find connections;

2. Decide that the search box for academic interests on the people directory accomplishes this well enough, and leave things alone, perhaps with some minor upgrades (like autocomplete in the search box)

3. Consider creating some other representation of member interests, like a weighted word cloud.

The basic issue that this all brings up is central to the mission of the Commons: how do we connect people who have shared interests?

I would appreciate input especially from Boone, Micki, and Chris on this, but all team members should comment!!