The need for a Virtual Community

The Higher Education in Europe has been undergoing a gradual process of harmonization since the so-called Bologna Declaration in 1999. The European Commission and national authorities created a group of several hundred experts, like University Rectors, Ministers and mobility experts, that would periodically meet and discuss the very complex harmonization process.

With online technologies becoming available to everybody, the European Commission decided to complement the physical meetings (Seminars) with an online virtual community, and to put all discussions, documents and meeting outcomes in public repositories. Their main need was an easy-to-use network of sites (a website for every seminar, plus the central Virtual Community site) supporting automatic synchronization of content and accounts across websites. An existing online solution was in place, based on the LDAP directory system.

The tender winner from the European Commission, the UNICA network of universities, chose Nuvole, with which it had already collaborated in other projects, for the technical development of the virtual community.

The central website: Virtual Community

Nuvole chose Open Atrium, the popular open-source Intranet system, for the Virtual Community: the needs of the experts were compatible with the standard requirements for a distributed Intranet system.

This provided the Virtual Community with groups (one for each planned Seminar, plus other groups by specific interest), each having a space for online discussions and for sharing documents.

Migration and Open Atrium customization: Rich user profiles

Since the Intranet had to replace a database of experts too, the default user profiles as found in Open Atrium were insufficient. Nuvole thus created a new profile with all the needed fields (University, country, field of expertise, biography and more) and associated it to users so that the default Open Atrium profile view would show all the available information about each expert.

The old data, including user pictures, were automatically migrated from the old LDAP system to the Open Atrium. User passwords were converted to the system used in Open Atrium and recreated so that the users could continue to use the same username and password. The free-text address field provided by experts was automatically geocoded in order to extract geographical information (country, city) from it and use it for a more effective user search.

Open Atrium customization: Faceted Search

In such a large and loosely-knit community the user search is crucial to success: it is necessary to be able to find an expert knowing only part of his name, or just his University, or country, or main field of expertise. Users pictures can help a lot too.

To this aim, Nuvole extended the Faceted Search module for a better integration with the Open Atrium features system, user management and mapping integration. As a result, users can now be searched on a list or on a map, according to combination of differents criteria like name, expertise and country.

The satellite websites: Conference Template

Nuvole prepared a conference template website, to be used for each of the Seminars. It is packaged as a standard Drupal installation profile and thus very secure and flexible.

The template can be completely customized: all colors are automatically recalculated starting from a base color chosen by the site editor, so that the color scheme can perfectly match any corporate identity. Moreover, it is preconfigured for inserting content in a modular way: it has preset display options for conference organizers and sponsors (with logo and website), for the conference schedule (that is easily entered as a series of activities, which are later automatically displayed in an attractive schedule table) and for credits to be put in the site footer. Standard information pages are very easily added too.

Conference Template: Registration System

The registration system can be enabled or disabled at any time by the site editor. When active, it allows experts to register to the seminar by simply typing their Virtual Community passwords: the entire network (all seminars and the Virtual Community) supports real-time synchronization of user data, so that the same password works on every site and any profile changes are immediately propagated to all sites.

The real-time synchronization is possible due to the OSSO single sign-on mechanism, which is also good in terms of security.

Aggregation: Automatic Content Replication

All seminars need and produce a large amount of documents. On one side, these need to be available on the seminar website, for the sake of completeness; on the orther side, for better reporting and more effective search it is very convenient to have the same content accessible on the Virtual Community site directly.

This is done through automatic synchronization of content between each seminar website and the corresponding group in the Virtual Community: any time news or documents are published, or even just modified, on any seminar website, they are automatically republished on the Virtual Community.