UCSF Open Proposals 3.0: Leveraging Organic Groups Release Notes

UCSF Open Proposals 3.0: Leveraging Organic Groups Release Notes

Feb 10 2015

Third major release of UCSF Open Proposals introduces Drupal Organic Groups-based architecture that lays ground for more sophisticated community management such as by-invitation or limited submission opportunities with role-based access to content. This architecture implements a better, lower cost maintenance model for Open Proposals. As of now, new Open Proposal forums (with typical requirements) can be configured and launched by a Site Admin without web development work and code release. Also, usage of system resources by new forums will improve due to the more efficient content structure.

3.0 introduces a few important audience engagement tools. First, the new Opportunity Announcements will replace the Administrative Proposals. Forum Managers (aka Opportunity Managers) will be able to post announcements on their forum that will be sent to all proposal authors and forum followers as opportunity announcement emails (different from the forum activity notifications that are sent based on users’ subscription status). Opportunity announcements will be prominently featured on the forum, visible to all visitors. Second, the new workflow for proposal and comment submission will include the pre-selected option to follow the opportunity activity which should help increase the number of followers, and eventually, bring more activity to the forum. Third, voting will now be enabled on comments, offering additional way for the users to interact with the forum discussions.

Content management capabilities in Open Proposals 3.0 have been extended to the Forum Manager role. Forum Manager will be able to edit text copy on forum pages and proposal submission form, update the timeline, change proposal statuses and even change the forum phase (e.g. from Submission to Review).

User interface improvements include a cleaner “proposal news feed” page with fewer calls to action for each proposal, and a better way of displaying social statistics such as number of followers for a given post. Open Proposals Home page has also been updated with the process infographic and a new layout for listed opportunities.

Even though Organic Groups may imply using group membership to manage online forums, Open Proposals 3.0 forums will continue to support open model where participation in Open Proposals opportunities is not based on group membership. In the future, however, the need may arise to support limited-access opportunities that will be based on a group membership.