Sakai UCamp - Initial planning meeting

[Barbara Glover]

Hi all,
The Sakai conference is just a few weeks away and we need to start  
formalizing the UCamp.

Let's have our first Sakai UCamp meeting at the following time:

Next Meeting: Tentative - Wednesday, November 14th, 1pm PST/ 4pm EST
Time is fast approaching for the Sakai UCamp and so we need to start  
planning what talks and design projects we want to include.  We have  
a nice list of suggestions but for any design projects, the design  
team will need to prepare ahead of time so we need to select  
something.  Check email lists for more discussion.

We'll have the meeting in the Breeze room.  Hope to see you there!
thanks
Barbara

One thing we'd like to do is a collaborative design + dev project.   
Here are a few ideas:

Reorderer Implementation in Sakai:
This functionality could be useful, usable and efficient in many  
places across the Sakai application. These following are some ideas  
for integration points:

     * Tool Order functionality (currently in Site Info) - we could  
even look at allowing users to reorganize the actual navigation  
itself so they are getting immediate and direct feedback about what  
they are doing.
     * Tab Reodering - allow users to reorder their tabs directly.  
This could be used with the current tab customization functionality  
and/or used to directly organize sites and tabs.
     * Resources - file organization within folders and between folders.
     * Image reodering between collections - lightbox allows for  
rerodering within a collection now. Next phase of Image Gallery will  
allow images to be moved in and out of collections also. UC Berkeley  
will likely implement this unless it's done as part of this activity.
     * Page orderer - where pages includes multiple tools (home for  
instance), allow users to dynamically and directly order the tools on  
the page.
     * Wiki - Thoughts about where the reorder could be used here?
     * Syllabus Tool - Allow users to reorder sections / components  
of their syllabus.

Other ideas:
   * Medium task - think again about the concepts of sub-spaces in  
the wiki. Are there some quick hits to be made?
     * Quick task - change (not remove!) the location / display of  
the Wiki breadcrumbs?
     * Announcements / Resources - they duplicate some functionality  
but display and terminology is different - could these be resolved?  
Are there points where this should also be the case for Schedule?
     * Schedule - there must be lots that could be done on this! How  
about inventing "all day events" with a neat way for them to be  
displayed?
     * Tools menu - a user of another similar system said that on his  
small-screen laptop, he really appreciated being able to 'fold up'  
the tools menu, so that (from his description) the tool names hid but  
the tool icons remained. How about something similar for Sakai?
     * Site Info - is the arrangement of the links in the actions bar  
of the Site Info tool logical? e.g. some are frequently used, others  
rarely (perhaps?) Should people consider re-arranging the tools in  
the actions bar?
     * Site Info - consider whether the information shown to students  
in Site Info is as logical as it should be - for example, don't they  
see the info from the home page displayed again under Site Info?
     * Permissions - could some minor changes be made to the  
permissions helper so that it was clearer how to use it? For example,  
could something as minor as (in some cases) changing the order in  
which permissions display be useful? Would it be clearer if the rows  
and columns were swapped? Could some visual indicators be given of  
the increasing 'power' of the permissions (e.g. shading going from  
dark to light to indicate how powerful a particular permission is)?  
Could a 'return to default settings' button be implemented? Could  
permission recipes be implemented? (e.g. click a button to set  
typical teaching site permissions)? These may be beyond the scope of  
the project, though!
     * Dull but useful - checking for consistency of styling in the  
HTML, especially in the actions bar, where some links have "|"  
between them and others don't, some have around the current link and  
others don't, especially.
     * Schedule - I don't suppose it would be possible to make it so  
that you can double-click an empty space in the schedule and the "add  
event" will be triggered? But perhaps a minor improvement might be  
that if you look at a day, and then click the 'add' button, it should  
assume that you want to add the event to that day.
     * Admin Sites tool - could some improvements be made to this to  
make life easier for administrators? e.g. displaying the tools in  
some sort of order when you add a new tool to a site using the Sites  
tool (or if they are in an order, making it clear which that order is!).
     * Profile tool - I can imagine there being some scope for  
improvements to the Profile tool if a UI team looked at it... Perhaps  
they could make some suggestions that the people at Lancaster might  
like to follow up, as they suggested that they might work on a way of  
uploading photos straight into it.
     * Admin Realms tool - okay, its a niche tool, but there is  
definitely scope for making our lives easier by improving the Realms  
tool - perhaps by allowing you a way of searching by site name, not  
just site id? Or simply displaying the site name & group / section  
names when you get into the view of the individual realms and sub- 
realms.
     * My Workspace - Message of the Dday view - should users really  
be allowed to click on 'options' and not see MoTD? should users  
really be allowed to choose to see the subject heading only, given  
that you can't then click through and see the body of the text?
     * MyWorkspace - how about a feature which allows people to set  
their own funky picture at the Site Logo for their MyWorkspace? Or it  
could show their Profile Picture as their MyWorkspace Site Logo (like  
Facebook)...


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