KNotations

We've been hammering at the bigger pre-release issues for the past few days in order to scope in detail the work they entail. There is one 'new' issue among the big pre-release to-dos: user Profiles. We've made some progress on creating and maintaining your profile, and on integrating a view of one's KNotes and portal-wise activity with summaries and views of one's other activities using social-software services like del.icio.us and Flickr.

We're hoping to show off some mockups next week, but may have to put that off for a week or two since we're trying to concentrate on work-scoping spread over all the other big issues as well.

Our profile work has three motivations:

• KNotes itself clearly needs such a feature (though we had not previosuly thought it needed the feature immediately)
• Plone portals are in desperate need of better tools for giving members a sense of presence and community
• KnowNet has become involved in some exciting research in which KNotes profiling and presence features could play an important role. We are very interested in the idea of personal learning environments, and on personal development planning/profiling tools, and the way both of these can interact at different levels of globality with the many emerging social-software services (this kind of proposed tool is usually called 'e-Portfolio', but there are other meanings of 'e-Portfolio' to beware of).

There are three areas of work and research we'll be undertaking: First, get a satisfying sense of people-presence into KNotes, and use that to expose a sense of community in Plone portals; a large part of that work is about providing an interface for viewing member activity and encouraging interactions among the members (for instance proposing topics of interest for birds of a feather). Second, open the profile to interact with some of the well known social-software services that users might also make use of: shared bookmarks, references and photos for instance. We're looking into using the del.icio.us API, for instance, to bring a user's top N tags into their KNotes profile display so that viewers of the profile can at-a-glance see what kinds of thing that member is bookmarking.

The third area of upcoming work is subtler, but potentially very exciting. It is not a pre-release issue, but I want to briefly document it here since it will be colouring our approach to profiles: Though the social software services are getting massive user-ship (and press), they are still unknown to the kinds of end-user we usually work with. I suspect that this will be true for some time across most community portal constituencies. We want to explore having KNotes provide a kind or proxy or gateway into the wider world of 'well-known-to-techies' services.

This could be very useful not only for soliciting activity from ordinary end-users and spreading the meme of social-software, but also for exploring ways in which communities of interest can keep some special-interest context in their 'social' software environments. The global services cannot provide rich or contextualised metadata, for instance. The example I like to give is very simple: the National Guidance Research Forum (NGRF) is one of our flagship portals. We're in the process of converting 1400-odd academic references from our own Annotated Reference format into 'real' bibliographic shared references via connotea (NGRF account) and citeUlike (NGRF account). These services - like all the other global ones - have very simple, unconstrained and uncontextualised 'tagging' systems. Many of the references in the NGRF content are about 'counselling' - which in that context means careers guidance counselling. But if we simply tag these references "counselling" they will be conflated with the more common meaning/context of psychological counselling. There are many such issues which I suspect will start to demand attention as more people begin to use tools like connotea and del.icio.us "in anger"; we're very interested to see how an environment like KNotes can provide access to global services but preserve some special contexts and tools while doing so.

Another aspect we'll be very excited to explore is using KNotes to help users to build up their own 'e-Portfolios' for non-formal learning, personalised learning, personal-development planning etc. And, finally, there is the exciting issue of Profiles for Communities/Portals (as opposed to individuals)!

That third phase will - of course - be taking place post-release!