International Initiative Registration Service workflows
By Ed Mitchell 23rd August 2013
We are building a prototype for an ‘International Initiative Registration’ service (IIRS). This will enable a Transition National Hub to embed the functionality of the Initaitives Directory into its own site, in its own language. It is part of our proposed international technical strategy – which is a conversation we are opening with the National Hubs, Transition Network staff and board and others.
This is a work in progress for a prototype which we hope will be ready for mid-September. Comments welcome!
What we would like to do next – are there any interested National Hubs?
This is a prototype, which we aim to have ready for the National Hubs meeting in Lyon on 19th September.
We hope that the national hubs will be interested in this service. If not, that is OK – it is a prototype and designed to be disposable. And the work we have done to produce it can be re-used for the next generation of our web project as we move Transitionnetwork.org onto Drupal 7.
We hope that at least one country will choose to trial this IIRS and move it to a ‘beta’ product. Once we know there is an interested country, we will launch the next phase of development, doing more work at the data and services layer. This will connect the IIRS to our real information system and ‘make it live’ and ready for testing. We will then ask the country administrator to do any further translations and start the beta trial.
The country administrator will administer the Initiative Profiles for their country. This process means they will need to ‘approve’ new initiatives, and can ‘edit’ existing ones. They are responsible!
This phase of beta trialling will give us a chance to learn more about the service. This is why it is deliberately simple now – the beta phase will produce a list of changes/improvements/etc. for us to assess ‘in the field’ rather than ‘in a laboratory’.
How does it work?
NB: you will see text in brackets E.g t(Banana) in these diagrams. This means that text represented in the brackets will be in the local language.
Each National Hub using the service will have a ‘Hub profile page’ on TN.org.
The Initiatives service will be shown in the local language, the rest of the site will be in English.
On the National Hub website, the ‘full page widget’ can be embedded
There are three ‘widget’ options. The Full Page widget, the Side Bar widget, and the Button Only widget.
We will look at the ‘full page widget’ as it is the coolest. Here is the map view:
Here is the ‘listings’ view:
Here is the search view:
When a user clicks on an Initaitive listing, that initiative’s profile will be shown in a pop-up
Users can add their initaitives from either TN.org or the National Hub site
The process is the same. Here we start from the ‘sidebar’ widget.
The user clicks on the ‘Add your initiative’ button.
The first step is about the user. They can:
- Login with an existing Transition Network account
- Quickly register a new Transition Network account
- Sign in using a third party social media account
Then they add the ‘core’ data about their initaitive
- Name
- Location
- Website (optional)
That’s it. We want to keep it short and simple. In the future, they can add more information, but for now, it’s all about keeping it short and simple. They will then see a ‘thank you’ page.
Following this, the Initiative profile is stored as ‘awaiting approval’ until the administrator approves it for publishing. This is because we want to keep on top of spam, and want to explore how and when and who is best to moderate this content.
It will be a two minute job to administer this; the administrator will receive an email alerting them to the request, click on the link, login, approve, that is the job done.