Dear Sowmya,

many thanks for your great ideas on how we could improve the Website and Forum functionalities!

We were discussing your ideas with our IT experts, but unfortunately the implementation would be very difficult and time consuming.

A link in the email digest (similar to "click here to reply online") to like and favorite / subscribe to a post, for example, would be difficult to implement because of security and technical reasons. For that you need to send out every digest mail personalized with private likes/favorite links. Means that every Email has to be generated for every single user. Now it is only generated once and sent out to all. Another problem is what happens with the mail if you forward it or somebody else read it and clicks on the personalized link..

Nevertheless, good ideas on how to improve the Forum and Website functionalities are always welcome!

Best regards,
Annkathrin (on behalf of the SuSanA Secretariat)

Dear Elisabeth,

I was wondering if we can have the following:

(a) To "like" and "favorite" documents on SuSanA Library? And, similar to the "Favorites" table of posts on our member profiles, it would be great if we could have a similar table for quick access.

(b) Tag (by everyone or for accessing on members profile pages) posts to quickly find posts based on some specific thought / area of interest to work on / refer to later.

(c) A link in the email digest (similar to "click here to reply online") to like and favorite / subscribe to a post. I read the daily email digest and so, this link would be great to have.

Warm regards,

Sowmya

Hi

Great thread this. I have just started working on a Knowledge Management (KM) project for the Gates Foundation Building Demand for Sanitation (BDS) programme (and Elisabeth, that definition of KM is 'mine' in the sense that I constructed it from other sources and my own experience, and it represents a perspective that has informed the plans for KM in BDS over the next 18 months). The report from the event that outlines the project proposal has already been uploaded here (see susana.org/lang-en/library/library?view=...eitem&type=2&id=2023), so people can see the direction in which we're hoping to go.

Two points

1. Excellent to see the thread on curation of link. I'm a long time user of Delicious.com, and know about the strengths of Diigo (no idea how people do collaborative research without using something similar!) A key part of the steer from the BDS grantees in the consultation that led to the KM project was about curating resources - signposting and summarising so that people can judge relevance and worth. A public collection of links in something like Diigo or Delicious (or Pearltree...) is one way for people to review, comment, rate specific resources. It will be interesting to hear about Joomla extensions, although I'd note that keeping everything within SuSanA restricts the opportunity for sharing outside this network, exploiting the serendipity that is so valuable in open, public spaces.

2. I'll be discussing how the BDS KM project can complement and link to SuSanA at meetings this week in Manila, with Arno Rosemarin from SuSanA, Roshan Shrestha and Jan Willem Rosenboom from the Foundation. I'd be really interested to meet anyone from this network who might be at the Asian Sanitation Dialogue this week and talk about KM within the sector.

Cheers

Pete

muench wrote: On my to-do list now is to investigate about Zotero and Pearltrees, as I have never heard of those before. Do we have many forum users who use these?

@ Mughal: about correcting typos and language mistakes: it would be really neat to have an editor that underlines in red any typing mistakes just like Word does. I think this kind of forum editor would be called "what you see is what you get" editor. We need to look into whether that is possible.

Concerning Zotero: I used that before, and it is very nice for managing a large number of citations when writing scientific publications. Not sure how it would benefit SuSanA though...

@Mughal and Elisabeth: while there are ways to do that in the editor (there should be a plugin for TinyMCE or CKeditor, what ever this forum is using) it doesn't work very well with all the different browsers and operating systems out there.
However this function is also build into modern browsers like Firefox (and Chrome I assume). It should work automatically in every window you type in. Maybe you have to install a language pack via the extension manager and select it by right clicking (under right click-> languages you also find a link to add additional languages).
Just like in Word it makes red lines under misspelled words and if you right click on it it gives you suggestions for the correct spelling.

Edit: support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-use-firefox-spell-checker

This has become a really excellent thread, full of ideas! Thanks a lot and please keep them coming. Some of the ideas raised by Sowmya go well beyond the Forum itself and deal more with wider issues around knowledge management and various sanitation databases... I am very happy that you (Sowmya) have found your way to the forum, your posts are very interesting! Please do keep them coming.

Related to some of the suggestions you raised, I recently came across this definition of knowledge management or KM which I would like to share (the Forum plays an important part in KM, but cannot fulfill all functions, at least not in its current state):

There is more consensus on practices and activities that should be included in a definition of KM, including:

1. Information management: the collection and management of material from one or more sources and making that material accessible to and usable by one or more audiences;
2. Knowledge sharing: a set of practices that enables people to share what they know with others in the application of their work;
3. Learning processes: both individual and collective or social, focusing less on the “sending” and more on the “receiving”, particularly the processes of sense making, understanding, and being able to act upon the information available.
4. Communication: in the sense of a meaningful exchange, as a foundational competence for the interactions that are at the center of learning, sharing and managing knowledge

(I am not totally sure as to the original source of this definition, but I first read it in a report by Pete Cranston from March 2014).

As we discuss and mull over the suggestions made above, we need to (as Sowmya said):

Though, I think it will take some time for the IT team to revert (if our suggestion is not prima facie infeasible within the existing tech structure) because this is part of a larger discussion on possible software improvements. That means waiting for more responses / suggestions, compiling and discussing solutions as a batch (to enable prioritization & avoid ending up with mutually exclusive choices!), evaluate cost effectiveness, possible tech partnerships as required and a million other things to explore / decide on.

The more we know what users find improtant, the better we can decide where to put IT resources into.

Arno Rosemarin said to me today:

It may be also useful to get feedback on navigation from the sporadic users that come and go. The regulars have created niche habits and may not have ideas that will be universally useful for novices. I see that there are many people that visit the site but never return.

Actually, we should not under-estimate the importance of passive forum users (people who read but don't post), because also they might benefit enormously from the forum. I liken it to Wikipedia, where I read information almost daily but have never ever written anything! And yet, it's a great resource.

Any ideas on how to get feedback from the sporadic users? Maybe a targeted survey sent out by e-mail might do the trick?

Finally, to pick up on a simple suggestion that Sowmya made:

(6) A link to SuSanA's home page (www.susana.org) on the forum page (once the user has gone to the forum page, there is no way to navigate back to the home page without typing URL in another tab / adding home page to browser bookmarks and navigate from there).

What do you mean with this? There is actually a link to the SuSanA website at the top left of the forum page. Maybe you didn't see it? Or it's not prominent enough? Or not displayed on all browsers perhaps (we have had strange problems with some browsers)?

And @ Kris: Yes the Forum is using Kunena which is a forum component of Joomla (the content management system of the SuSanA website). Any extensions or functionalities that are available in Kunena which we like should be relatively easy to implement, I think. (only small problem is that the version of Kunena that we use is a bit outdated by now; we use Kunena 1.7 and there is now Kunena 3.x)

On my to-do list now is to investigate about Zotero and Pearltrees, as I have never heard of those before. Do we have many forum users who use these?

@ Mughal: about correcting typos and language mistakes: it would be really neat to have an editor that underlines in red any typing mistakes just like Word does. I think this kind of forum editor would be called "what you see is what you get" editor. We need to look into whether that is possible. As a work-around, like Chris suggested, you could first write your post in Word and then copy & paste it into the forum. Secondly, anyone can edit his or her own post at any time (i.e. if you spot a typo a day later), just click on the edit button below your post when you are logged in. The moderators can edit all posts, and I have on occasions gently corrected typos here and there when the posts were important and I could see that the typos made the sentences difficult to understand. I do this under the assumption that people would be grateful to have such typos corrected in their posts and do not find it intrusive.

Oh, and you also said:

How can the forum users reward you both??!!

The best reward any forum user can give us forum moderators is - as you do already - to write plenty of good posts, engage in discussions with others, help other people along when they ask questions (especially novices) and so forth. This is how you can make me and Roslyn happy!
(Roslyn, who was an intern in the SuSanA secretariat, is actually leaving the SuSanA secretariat this week (her successor is Sebastian Klos) - but maybe she will still say Good-Bye herself)

Kind regards,
Elisabeth

Before we go wild with suggesting "free" 3rd party services (if you are not paying for it, you are not the customer but the product...) we should probably look into what available (open-source) extensions there are for the platform SuSanA seems to be build on, i.e.:
extensions.joomla.org/
www.kunena.org/

I would like to second Sowmya's idea with pearltrees, as it reflects something we've also discussed on the EcoSanRes Yahoo! mailing list in the past: a bookmarking service that helps us tag relevant content and then share it with the group. So instead of one back office that feeds the library, there could be a global group where everyone contributes his/her links. Either as our own social bookmarking site or as a SuSanA group on Diigo, Delicious or Pearltrees that could be displayed here. E.g. groups.diigo.com/group/sustainable-sanitation, although I also like pearltrees and would personally prefer the tool with the best browser integration. Even pinterest!

(thx Elisabeth for starting this topic!)

Hi Detlef,

I had read your post and so, I should have given reference to it in my wishlist, my apologies for having forgotten to do so.

Though, I think it will take some time for the IT team to revert (if our suggestion is not prima facie infeasible within the existing tech structure) because this is part of a larger discussion on possible software improvements. That means waiting for more responses / suggestions, compiling and discussing solutions as a batch (to enable prioritization & avoid ending up with mutually exclusive choices!), evaluate cost effectiveness, possible tech partnerships as required and a million other things to explore / decide on.

I have also been following the discussion on English language usage. Just my personal opinion, I think it is lovely to have the discussions the way it is now. If someone has a different usage of English, there is an added layer of language appreciation when we read the message (for instance, a thing is always "it" in English but some languages attribute gender to things - so, we get to learn nuances of different languages without actually learning the entire language). It is as haute as appreciating cuisine from all over the world and as relevant as gaining surprising nuggets of wisdom from reading folktales from different parts of the world. In any case, language is for communication and if it is not going to mean the difference between success and failure, why not enjoy all the diversity instead of going into homogenous communication mode? Why stick to Wren & Martin when we can have our own fusion music? (metaphors mixed )

Best wishes,

Sowmya

Hi Chris,

Thank you for the message. My name is pronounced sow-mya ('sow' is pronounced 'sove' to rhyme with 'dove' - dove the bird though I cannot claim to be as nice - and 'mya' has the same pronunciation as 'mya' in 'myanmar').

I really hope you will check out Zotero and Pearltrees.

Zotero (www.zotero.org): I recommend simply because I love it - it is a free-to-use research (bibliographic) tool that resides in your web browser and is displayed as a small button that you can click on to open the zotero window (the zotero window is simply superimposed on whatever content you are viewing on the browser and can be resized as per your convenience). Then, you can add URL links, citation for articles published in scientific journals, add all your pdf documents, create unlimited folders and sub-folders, sync across devices, put it in an external hard disk and carry it with you when you travel and collaborate with others. You can also create citation in different styles directly from zotero into MS Word! And what I think is fab about it is that we don't need to do "printscreen" multiple times if we want to save the whole of a long webpage or "print as pdf" - the entire webpage is saved in zotero, very useful when there is a possibility that the link might not work later on / need to work offline etc. I once found a discussion thread on how to sync between Zotero and EverNote (another bibliographic tool). Zotero can now be used on Google Chrome also.

Pearltrees (www.pearltrees.com): On Pearltrees, we can collaboratively create a collection of URLs to webpages, files, notes, photos, etc. Each piece is considered a pearl and we create pearltree(s) of it. I will create an example on Pearltrees and share it soon.

Best wishes,

Sowmya

Dear Chris,

Thank you for your nice comments, and for the suggestion.

I reckon, Elisabeth and Roslyn will give their views, when they are back on work on Monday morning!!

Regards,

F H Mughal

Dear Sowmya,

Your point

(2) Finding attachments mentioned in the discussion threads: ...

I suggested this partly many months ago , but using a kind of German-English . Maybe it was not understand well by the susana-office... Probably your detailed suggestion is now prompting IT-changes in this direction!?

All the Best
Detlef

Dear Mughal,

I think you are doing very well with your English here on the Forum. One suggestion may be to write each post in Word (or a similar program), where spelling and grammar are checked, then copy and paste it to the Forum. These same features could potentially be integrated into the Forum, but I suspect the programmers would say that this would be difficult.

I also suggest that we not worry about the differences between UK and US English. The differences are small and fully intelligible in both directions.

We all know that many Forum members are not native speakers of English, so we should not expect perfection.

Best wishes,
Chris Canaday