I'm the Information Manager for a large union, and we're in the middle of going throught a similar process of trying to decide what CMS to use. We're strongly leaning towards vendors use openACS and Zope. Given that you aren't going to have tons of users adding content, I'd stay away from openACS; I think it's just too complicated to be worth it. I'd have your Perl programmers take a close look at Zope and Python and see what they think. With Zope, it's easy to build a simple solution and then scale it as your needs expand. Plus python is a fabulous language that your programmers won't have any trouble picking up.
If Zope doesn't appeal to them, I'd check out E Z Publish. Of all of the PHP-based systems, it's the one that impressed us the most. The web site supporting it is pretty crappy, so make sure your programmers check out the API documentation to get a sense of what it's capable of doing.
Alternatively, given the relatively small number of contributing users you have, I'd go for something very simple, and I'd make sure that whatever they build is set up so that they could move out of it and into something else down the road if your needs change or if someone comes up with a really great CMS system that makes everyone happy (I don't think we're there yet). For example, there are a number of systems where articles are stored in a sane XML format so a smart hacker could get the info into another system.
The biggest lesson I learned from several months of looking at CMSes and talking to people who were struggling with the same question is that nobody's figured this out yet. The same names--Zope, openACS, Midgard--kept coming up and so did the same frustrations. So if you don't think you've found a great answer, that's a good sign.
Some of my best friends are doctors.... Seriously, though, we like 'em. I think SEIU has the largest group of organized interns and residents in the US, called the Committee of Interns and Residents. They're at http://www.cirdocs.org/. And while I don't think we've organized any doctors as a bargaining unit--yet--I think we may have members who are physicians who work for state government. For interns and residents, most of the organizing has focused around getting their hours down to a less insane level so that hopefully they don't accidentally kill someone because they haven't slept in ages.
Thanks for the help (from Anders Schneiderman)
on
Flash and Open Source
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· Score: 1
I just wanted to thank the many people who posted really helpful advice. It was great to see that there are some open source options if we do some Flash work for our educational simulations/toys, and it was helpful to be reminded just how much Flash can be misused and abused.
Most of all, thanks for letting me know about SVG. I was sure we'd end up having to just use Java, which as a tool for designing really enticing interfaces leaves a lot to be desired. I've downloaded a bunch of tools for and information about SVG, and I'm looking forward to taking it out for a test drive.
Sometime in the next week I'm going to be meeting with the Higher Ups about open source. The help I got here will be Exhibit A of why the open source world is such an amazing place to be and why we should join & start contributing to it.
Anders Schneiderman
Information Manager
SEIU International
That's great! I'm going to pass your comment on to the people who develop the message and content for our sites--unfortunately, I've got no say.
For a better idea of what SEIU is all about and what we stand for, here are a few sites that cover some of our campaigns:
Fixing West Virginia Nursing Home. We represent nursing home workers, who get paid painfully low wages & work in nursing homes that are scarily understaffed. http://www.wvnursinghomes.org/
Fighting for nurses: pushing for sane staffing levels and safer needles. http://www.nursealliance.org/staffing/stand.cfm and http://www.nursealliance.org/care/federal.cfm (and yes, the site design is... well you wouldn't want to unleash its designer on Flash, but again, out of my hands). Nurses have been quitting in droves, and at the rate we're going, we won't have enough nurses left to take care of people who are sick and/or elderly. That's why nurses, hardly a brick-throwing bunch, have been joining SEIU in large numbers: so they can work together to fight for working conditions that won't drive more nurses from the field.
Janitors: fighting for wages a family can live on, basic health care and other benefits, and more generally fighting for respect for the people who clean our toilets & make our society function: http://www.justiceforjanitors.org/
I didn't make this clear in earlier posts because it didn't occur to me that anyone would get confused, but... only a small piece of the site will be Flash (or more likely, SVG or Java). Obviously, if you're trying to give someone answers to straightforward policy questions, then HTML is more than adequate. Unfortunately, there are areas of policy in which it's really hard to get a handle on them just using text alone, particularly areas that involve lots of numbers. It is these limited areas that, in addition to text, we'd like to use a more interactive approach. In the "real" world, this is when trainers use games to get the audience more involved and to let them get a better feel for what all the numbers mean. The point of this project is to look for a way of having the same effect online. We could do this all using CGI scripts and have done so in the past, but we'd like tools that let us produce a slicker interface, since it definitely makes a difference when training.
I wrote the original post, and I'm glad you asked the questions you did; I'm sure other people are wondering the same thing. Here are my answers:
1) Profit? Not exactly.... I work for the Service Employees International Union, not a company. I have lots of reasons to use an open source strategy, but making money isn't one of them.
2) I'm definitely not trying to scam work/money off of anyone. In the first phase of our plan, we're going to work with a vendor to build the first round of tools, and obviously all the developers involved will have Flash MX.
3) One of the reasons almost all Flash you see is advertising or a waste of bandwidth is that most of the people who'd like to use it for educational work are scared off by the amount of work & skill it would take to do it well. We'd like to see how far we can reduce this barrier. Our plan is to build several interactive educational toys, and then we're hoping to use what we learn to figure out what code, etc. we can write that would make it easier for us as well as other nonprofits to use Flash/Java/SVG/etc for interactive education.
4) After we've got a core of paid work done, I'd like to make the project as enticing as possible to volunteers (although we'll still pay for some development). Many of the nonprofits who would do a kick-ass job of building educational policy toys can't afford programmers, so most of their work will have to be done by volunteers, and most of these nonprofits can't afford to spend the money to buy a bunch of copies of Flash--these are shops where they get new PCs every 5-8 years. There are also lots of volunteers who may want to help us out because they like the politics of the project. Although I can convince the Top Brass to give me some money to buy Flash for some of them, it won't be enough to cover all of them, and I don't want to have volunteers not be able to work on this project because the cost of the tools is so high.
5) Whether we use Java, Flash, SVG, or a mix of these for different projects, I want to do this as an open source project with, eventually, lots of volunteers involved, because I hope to use this as one of several campaigns to convince the union movement to embrace open source. Most large unions--and for that matter, most large nonprofits--spend a lot of money buying proprietary systems from vendors, often getting ripped off in the process. If we could start to get that money flowing into open source projects, we could easily build many of the tools smaller nonprofits need but can't afford.
This injection of cash would also help solve some of the major problems open source faces, particularly on the desktop, in obtaining wider acceptance. Although things are _much_ better than they were a few years ago, a lot of open source software is still too hard to use, has user interfaces that aren't designed for people who don't get computers, and the user manuals are often crap. If we could harness only a tiny amount of the money unions and large nonprofits spend on software, we could radically change this, because it's something we could convince them to pay for--"if you pay $20,000 for a UI facelift, you get the other $100,000 worth of software for free."
So relax, dude; this isn't bottom feeding. I'm just trying to get this dinosaur turned around in the right direction.
In Unity,
Anders Schneiderman
Information Manager
SEIU International
Re:Flash is Style over Substance, Usability Nightm
on
Flash and Open Source
·
· Score: 1
I think of the web itself as a giant step backward in usability. Unlike standard GUIs, the people building HTML-based web sites pretty much made up their own interface. There's been a bit of standardization since the web took off, but it's still a pain in the ass.
For example, many web pages have "Printer friendly" versions of a page, but where the link to it is, what it looks like, etc. can differ wildly. In contrast, if you're using a client-based GUI on a Windows box and you want to print a page, you can be pretty sure that to print a file you go to a menu at the top of the screen called "File" and then go to a button called "Print."
We're considering Flash--along with Java and now SVG--for only a very small part of our site, primarily simulations & games for teaching. You can do this via HTML/CGI, but for the kind of educational toys we're thinking of making, it's not a very good medium; it's too hard to create the graphics & immediate interaction we want to have. The reason you don't think much of Flash is that 99.9% of what it's used for is essentially advertising. We don't plan on using anything but HTML except where SVG/Java/Flash gives us capacities we otherwise don't have.
Slashdot Mirror
>we are already seeing some awesome Linux hacking coming out of Brazil
Could you say a little more about that? I'd be very interested to know what OS projects are taking off in Brazil.
Thanks,
Anders Schneiderman
If Zope doesn't appeal to them, I'd check out E Z Publish. Of all of the PHP-based systems, it's the one that impressed us the most. The web site supporting it is pretty crappy, so make sure your programmers check out the API documentation to get a sense of what it's capable of doing.
Alternatively, given the relatively small number of contributing users you have, I'd go for something very simple, and I'd make sure that whatever they build is set up so that they could move out of it and into something else down the road if your needs change or if someone comes up with a really great CMS system that makes everyone happy (I don't think we're there yet). For example, there are a number of systems where articles are stored in a sane XML format so a smart hacker could get the info into another system.
The biggest lesson I learned from several months of looking at CMSes and talking to people who were struggling with the same question is that nobody's figured this out yet. The same names--Zope, openACS, Midgard--kept coming up and so did the same frustrations. So if you don't think you've found a great answer, that's a good sign.
Good luck!
Thanks,
Anders Schneiderman
Some of my best friends are doctors.... Seriously, though, we like 'em. I think SEIU has the largest group of organized interns and residents in the US, called the Committee of Interns and Residents. They're at http://www.cirdocs.org/. And while I don't think we've organized any doctors as a bargaining unit--yet--I think we may have members who are physicians who work for state government. For interns and residents, most of the organizing has focused around getting their hours down to a less insane level so that hopefully they don't accidentally kill someone because they haven't slept in ages.
I just wanted to thank the many people who posted really helpful advice. It was great to see that there are some open source options if we do some Flash work for our educational simulations/toys, and it was helpful to be reminded just how much Flash can be misused and abused.
Most of all, thanks for letting me know about SVG. I was sure we'd end up having to just use Java, which as a tool for designing really enticing interfaces leaves a lot to be desired. I've downloaded a bunch of tools for and information about SVG, and I'm looking forward to taking it out for a test drive.
Sometime in the next week I'm going to be meeting with the Higher Ups about open source. The help I got here will be Exhibit A of why the open source world is such an amazing place to be and why we should join & start contributing to it.
Anders Schneiderman
Information Manager
SEIU International
That's great! I'm going to pass your comment on to the people who develop the message and content for our sites--unfortunately, I've got no say.
For a better idea of what SEIU is all about and what we stand for, here are a few sites that cover some of our campaigns:
Fixing West Virginia Nursing Home. We represent nursing home workers, who get paid painfully low wages & work in nursing homes that are scarily understaffed. http://www.wvnursinghomes.org/
Fighting for nurses: pushing for sane staffing levels and safer needles. http://www.nursealliance.org/staffing/stand.cfm and http://www.nursealliance.org/care/federal.cfm (and yes, the site design is... well you wouldn't want to unleash its designer on Flash, but again, out of my hands). Nurses have been quitting in droves, and at the rate we're going, we won't have enough nurses left to take care of people who are sick and/or elderly. That's why nurses, hardly a brick-throwing bunch, have been joining SEIU in large numbers: so they can work together to fight for working conditions that won't drive more nurses from the field.
Janitors: fighting for wages a family can live on, basic health care and other benefits, and more generally fighting for respect for the people who clean our toilets & make our society function: http://www.justiceforjanitors.org/
I didn't make this clear in earlier posts because it didn't occur to me that anyone would get confused, but... only a small piece of the site will be Flash (or more likely, SVG or Java). Obviously, if you're trying to give someone answers to straightforward policy questions, then HTML is more than adequate. Unfortunately, there are areas of policy in which it's really hard to get a handle on them just using text alone, particularly areas that involve lots of numbers. It is these limited areas that, in addition to text, we'd like to use a more interactive approach. In the "real" world, this is when trainers use games to get the audience more involved and to let them get a better feel for what all the numbers mean. The point of this project is to look for a way of having the same effect online. We could do this all using CGI scripts and have done so in the past, but we'd like tools that let us produce a slicker interface, since it definitely makes a difference when training.
I wrote the original post, and I'm glad you asked the questions you did; I'm sure other people are wondering the same thing. Here are my answers:
1) Profit? Not exactly.... I work for the Service Employees International Union, not a company. I have lots of reasons to use an open source strategy, but making money isn't one of them.
2) I'm definitely not trying to scam work/money off of anyone. In the first phase of our plan, we're going to work with a vendor to build the first round of tools, and obviously all the developers involved will have Flash MX.
3) One of the reasons almost all Flash you see is advertising or a waste of bandwidth is that most of the people who'd like to use it for educational work are scared off by the amount of work & skill it would take to do it well. We'd like to see how far we can reduce this barrier. Our plan is to build several interactive educational toys, and then we're hoping to use what we learn to figure out what code, etc. we can write that would make it easier for us as well as other nonprofits to use Flash/Java/SVG/etc for interactive education.
4) After we've got a core of paid work done, I'd like to make the project as enticing as possible to volunteers (although we'll still pay for some development). Many of the nonprofits who would do a kick-ass job of building educational policy toys can't afford programmers, so most of their work will have to be done by volunteers, and most of these nonprofits can't afford to spend the money to buy a bunch of copies of Flash--these are shops where they get new PCs every 5-8 years. There are also lots of volunteers who may want to help us out because they like the politics of the project. Although I can convince the Top Brass to give me some money to buy Flash for some of them, it won't be enough to cover all of them, and I don't want to have volunteers not be able to work on this project because the cost of the tools is so high.
5) Whether we use Java, Flash, SVG, or a mix of these for different projects, I want to do this as an open source project with, eventually, lots of volunteers involved, because I hope to use this as one of several campaigns to convince the union movement to embrace open source. Most large unions--and for that matter, most large nonprofits--spend a lot of money buying proprietary systems from vendors, often getting ripped off in the process. If we could start to get that money flowing into open source projects, we could easily build many of the tools smaller nonprofits need but can't afford.
This injection of cash would also help solve some of the major problems open source faces, particularly on the desktop, in obtaining wider acceptance. Although things are _much_ better than they were a few years ago, a lot of open source software is still too hard to use, has user interfaces that aren't designed for people who don't get computers, and the user manuals are often crap. If we could harness only a tiny amount of the money unions and large nonprofits spend on software, we could radically change this, because it's something we could convince them to pay for--"if you pay $20,000 for a UI facelift, you get the other $100,000 worth of software for free."
So relax, dude; this isn't bottom feeding. I'm just trying to get this dinosaur turned around in the right direction.
In Unity, Anders Schneiderman Information Manager SEIU International
I think of the web itself as a giant step backward in usability. Unlike standard GUIs, the people building HTML-based web sites pretty much made up their own interface. There's been a bit of standardization since the web took off, but it's still a pain in the ass.
For example, many web pages have "Printer friendly" versions of a page, but where the link to it is, what it looks like, etc. can differ wildly. In contrast, if you're using a client-based GUI on a Windows box and you want to print a page, you can be pretty sure that to print a file you go to a menu at the top of the screen called "File" and then go to a button called "Print."
We're considering Flash--along with Java and now SVG--for only a very small part of our site, primarily simulations & games for teaching. You can do this via HTML/CGI, but for the kind of educational toys we're thinking of making, it's not a very good medium; it's too hard to create the graphics & immediate interaction we want to have. The reason you don't think much of Flash is that 99.9% of what it's used for is essentially advertising. We don't plan on using anything but HTML except where SVG/Java/Flash gives us capacities we otherwise don't have.