HEADS Website and Collaboration Platform

(1)

Deliverable reference: Date: Responsible partner:

D6.1 27 November 2013 ATC

Project co-funded by the European Commission within the Seventh Framework Programme

(FP7-ICT-2013-10)) ICT-2013.1.2: Software Engineering,

Services and Cloud Computing Grant Agreement No.: 611337

www.heads-project.eu

Title:

D6.1 : HEADS public website and collaboration platform

Editor(s): Approved by:

Trine Seeberg (SINTEF), Ilias Spais, Garifalia Sebou (ATC)

Project Manager or Technical Manager Classification:

Public Abstract / Executive summary:

This deliverable presents the functionality of the official website of the HEADS project as well as the collaboration platform. The document describes the main parts of the project website and presents the publicly accessible area of the website. Moreover, the HEADS eRoom collaboration platform which will support the communication, collaboration and information sharing as well as project related documents between project partners is presented along with the most important aspects related to its use.

Document URL:

http://heads-project.eu/node/196

(2)

Version 1.0: Final 2013-11-27 D6.1: HEADS public website and collaboration

platform Page 2 of 21

Version History

Description Date Who

0.0 ToC 2013-11-04 ATC/I.Spais – G.Sebou

0.1 Contribution 2013-11-06 SINTEF/T. Seeberg

0.2 First draft release 2013-11-12 ATC/I.Spais – G.Sebou

0.3 1st_review _2013-11-14 _{M2Mzone/ E. Roarke}

0.4 Second release 2013-11-15 ATC/I.Spais – G.Sebou

0.5 2nd review 2013-11-18 SINTEF/ A. Liverud

0.6 Third release 2013-11-21 ATC/I.Spais – G.Sebou

0.6.1 3nd_review _2013-11-22 _{SINTEF/T. Seeberg}

0.7 Fourth release 2013-11-22 ATC/I.Spais – G.Sebou

0.7.1 Final review 2013-11-24 SINTEF/B. Morin

1.0 Final release 2013-11-27 ATC/I.Spais – G.Sebou

Copyright

This document has been produced within the scope of the HEADS Project and is a public report. The utilisation and release of this document is subject to the conditions of the contract within the 7th Framework Programme, grant agreement no. 611337.

(4)

1 The HEADS website

1.1 Structure of the Website

As a central point for dissemination purposes, the HEADS consortium has created the project website available since November 2013 at www.heads-project.eu. The initial version of the website has been deployed, using the graphical features of the logo. The content of the website will be incrementally posted and change frequently as the project evolves. We want to have a “vivid website” and publish relevant information about the project and highlight key results, now only just a preliminary overview of the content is placed.

The HEADS website contains, information regarding the project, its objectives, expected results, impact, news and project partners. Under the homepage, the web site provides a summary of the most important project information.

The main parts of HEADS website are summarised below:

 The Home page section, consisting of general project information.

 The Overview section, consisting of the project objectives, current status and the selected approach.

 The Challenges section, consisting of the vision, results and the project’s potential impact for the relevant stakeholders.

 The Community section, consisting of the consortium table, the “contact us” page and links relevant to HEADS context.

 The Downloads section, to make accessible any related “public” dissemination material, publications and public deliverables.

 The News section, containing all HEADS relevant news and events (past and upcoming).

 The Private Area section, to give access to all partners to the HEADS project a storing and sharing environment. This area will also be used to review content before making it public. The following table (Table 1) summarizes the main characteristics of the HEADS website and Figure 1 presents HEADS home page.

Table 1 Website (www.heads-project.eu)

Characteristics Description

Objective The website will be visited universally by people outside the project.

Key Message/Content The vision of HEADS

The use and value of the HEADS context and objectives Target Stakeholder Users & Beneficiaries

Influencers Providers

(5)

Information Required & Level of Detail

All internal and external documentation and material Extensive detail

Information Providers All Project Partners and contact details of HEADS Coordinator

Communication Methods Internet, social networks Activity Required for Production

& Delivery

Gathering various content from the partners

Gathering content from other sources (e.g. other sites) Content/comments from users

Website content managers insert all information through relevant functions of the website CMS

Frequency & Timing Created at the very early beginning of the project and updated throughout the lifecycle of the project

Feedback and Follow Up Activity All WP leaders to ensure information is timely and relevant

(6)

Figure 1 HEADS website

Figure 2 presents some other features of the website such as Twitter and RSS Feeds buttons as well as a Search box and Latest News area are available. Additionally, project’s Twitter account

(7)

posts as well as Subscription to newsletter area are presented. These features are highlighted by the red arrows and boxes in the following screenshot.

(8)

1.2 Technology Used

The HEADS website is built on Drupal [1]. Drupal is a free software package that allows you to easily organize, manage and publish your content, with an endless variety of customisation. Drupal is open source software maintained and developed by a community of 630,000+ users and developers. It's distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or "GPL"), which means anyone is free to download it and share it with others. This open development model means that people are constantly working to make sure Drupal is a cutting-edge platform that supports the latest technologies that the Web has to offer. The Drupal project's principles encourage modularity, standards, collaboration, ease-of-use, and more.

Drupal features utilized in HEADS web site are mentioned below:

 Organise and Find content: By utilizing Drupal tools that automatically create friendly path URLs, the administrator of the side is able to organize and structure content and in sequence quickly access content.

 Creative Content: Another important feature offered by Drupal is the flexible way of handling content types including video, text, blog, podcasts, and polls. An easy-to-use web interface can be utilized to robustly manage users, handle menu and real-time statistics.

 Administer: Drupal offers great options for new user accounts and user permissions. Users can be assigned one or more roles, and each role can be set up with fine-grained permissions, allowing users to view and create only what the administrator permits.

 Collaborate: Web sites deployed on Drupal platform offer a collaborative framework in order to help users express their opinions and engage with one another. The content of the web site is the result of a collaborative process in which the administrator has tight control over who can create, view, administer, publish and interact with it.

 Build, design and display: Drupal was selected for the development of HEADS web site due to its capability of building websites with no custom programming. By utilizing a custom configuration, site features and functionalities are offered as a single installation. Furthermore, from a pool of several existing Drupal themes, the most appropriate one was selected. In this way, projects identity was re-enforced and its brand is exposed to the internet community.

 Modules: From a pool of 16.000 available modules, the developers of the web site selected those that efficiently address the basic requirements (adding and managing content, hosting information coming from the social networks, etc.).

1.3 Available Content Types

The Website defines nine different types of content, which can be uploaded and regularly updated, as follows:

 Generic: this content type refers to a general Web page created to support the current content already published on the Website. The page title, the date and time of creation/modification and the page description are the necessary fields.

 Publication: this content type refers to any kind of publications generated by the project. The publication title, the authors, the publication date, the place and the publication description are the necessary fields, supported by any additional comments.

(9)

 Document: this content type refers to the public documents directly produced by the HEADS Consortium, as part of the FP7 611337 Grant Agreement. The document title and the respective file are the necessary fields.

 News: this content type refers to project news with respect to activities and plans relevant to the accountability for the cloud. The news title, the date of news event occurrence and the news description are the necessary fields.

 Event: this content type refers to relevant events, which can be uploaded on the Portal. An event title, the date range and the event description are the necessary fields.

These types correlate to the various content blocks (as they are defined in Drupal), which can be seen in the project so far, but further content types may be added in the future, as necessary. A screenshot of the Website administration menu for adding different content types is seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3 Adding content of different types on the HEADS website

1.4 Procedures for Publishing Content

HEADS consortium decided to let the WP leaders handle the posting of content to the web site. Each one of them aggregates info from all the members of the WP and after analysing the content he/she posts it in the web site. At this early phase of the project and having in mind that web sites are attracting people only if they expose useful information and are not blank, HEADS Consortium adopted a simple process and do not utilise time consuming methods that include several revisions of the content before being uploaded. It is obvious that this decision will be re-considered in the following months.

Table 2 Assignment of WP Leaders for Publishing Content

Reference Title and Name Organization

WP1 Ilias Spais ATC

WP2 Franck Fleurey SINTEF

WP3 Eamonn Roarke M2MZone

(10)

Reference Title and Name Organization

WP5 Walter Waterfeld SAG

WP6 Knut Eilif Husa TELLU

WP7 Project Manager - Trine M. Seeberg SINTEF

1.5 Means for Website Traffic Monitoring

The dissemination leader will be in charge of the following two tools that will monitor the traffic of HEADS web site.

1.5.1 Google analytics

Focusing on HEADS web site, Google analytics platform will be utilised by the dissemination leader to monitor the engagement of all the relevant stakeholders. Customised reports will be compiled and useful conclusions will be drawn regarding the content of the site.

The tool will also be used to modify if necessary the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy, with the ultimate goal to make HEADS popular to the web community. HEADS presence in the most well-known search engines (like Google and Yahoo) will be monitored monthly.

1.5.2 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The following table (Table 3) summarises the main characteristics of the utilisation of Search Engine Optimisation processes.

Table 3 Search Engine Optimization for HEADS project

Objective Make sure that the website is highly ranked in search engines

Key Message/Content Raise general awareness of the project

Target Stakeholder Major Search Engines (SE) like Google

Information Required & Level of Detail

Need to list relevant keywords and use them in the pages, titles Required tagging of the maps in the identified search engines Use of a SEO specialist

Information Providers All WP Leaders

Communication Methods Outsourcing SEO

Web-based interactions with SEs Activity Required for Production &

Delivery

Decide upon advertising budget (optional)

Create a Budget plan (by using Google ad-words – optional) Frequency & Timing

Set up strategy and check if the strategy works after a period of time

Modify the SEO strategy according to project milestones Feedback and Follow Up Activity Use traffic tools such as Google analytics and modify SEO

(11)

1.6 European Privacy Directive 2009/136

1

The website adheres to the European Directive 2002/58, as amended by Directive 2009/136 on Privacy and Electronic Communications, otherwise known as E-Privacy Directive, is an EU directive on data protection and privacy in the digital age. The amendment introduces several changes, especially in what concerns cookies, that are now subject to prior consent.

2 Support for communication, collaboration and information

sharing.

To support communication, collaboration and information sharing in the project, the following tools are used:

 Telephone and teleconferences – phone calls among project participants are important for clarifications, discussions and for other urgent communication needs. Teleconference services are used to support teleconferences on a regular basis;

 E-mail – for asynchronous communication (announcements, messages, discussions…), Dedicated mailing lists are available from the HEADS eRoom and enable distribution of mails to groups of recipients reflecting the project organisation. The subject line of all emails in the project should start with the "HEADS:"; and

 The HEADS eRoom – provides secure information and document sharing with support for collaborative document editing and version control. Also offering support for comments, discussions and databases

Additional tools may be introduced later in the project for new needs. In particular, tools supporting the technical collaboration and integration among partners will be described in D5.2: Infrastructure and Development Guidelines. The open-source code to be developped in HEADS will be hosted on GitHub, a platform for social coding providing free open-source Git repositories, and already hosting 16 millions repositories (with an uptime of 99,7%), including major open-source projects such as Linux, Scala or Git itself. Some of the HEADS baseline projects (to be presented in D5.1) are already hosted on GitHub.

Use of the mailing list and the HEADS eRoom are described in more detail in the sub-sections below.

2.1 The HEADS eRoom introduction.

The HEADS eRoom will be the main environment for storing and sharing information and project related documents, such as plans, minutes, deliverables, working drafts and progress reports. In this section, the most important aspects related to the use of the HEADS eRoom are presented. The HEADS eRoom is one of several eRoom’s present on this web based platform, a shared

(12)

working environment hosted by SINTEF. The HEADS eRoom is created and managed by SINTEF.

The SINTEF eRoom platform is based on EMC Documentum eRoom 7.4.1. All users of the HEADS eRoom must be registered as a member. Any requests for membership should be sent by e-mail to the Project manager who is managing the registration.

When registered as a member, the user will be provided with a user account, a default password (should be changed after the first login) and the web-address for the HEADS eRoom. In addition, the membership will be given a role (coordinator, participant or observer) which imply general, initial permissions. The typical role of a member of the HEADS eRoom is participant.

An eRoom plug-in is an optional but recommended feature available for eRoom members using Windows. The plug-in provides extended functionality and enhanced user interface. It needs to be installed2_{on your local computer (requires 4 MB) and can be turned on}3_{or off when installed.}

The plug-in only works under Windows.

2.2 Main structure

The HEADS eRoom is structured with a few folders at the top level, as shown in Figure 4 and described in the following.

Figure 4 The front page of the HEADS eRoom (per October 2013)

 Technical work

This folder contains sub folders for each work package and is the area where most of the project work takes place. It is described further in Section 1.3.

 Management

This folder is shown in Figure 5 and contains everything related to the management and official documents for the project. It provides subfolder for

a. Governing documents;

2_{At first login, installation of the plug-in will be offered as an option. Installation is also available when}

you attempt to activate the plug-in without prior installation.

(13)

b. Financial_ information like database for bank account information and payments; c. Tools _ templates for documents and presentations, logos and other useful

information;

d. Deliverables_ information related to deliverables;

Figure 5 The sub-structure of the Management folder (per October 2013)

 Calendar

This holds all project meetings with detailed information, but also other relevant events where HEADS researchers will participate.

 Contacts database

This holds the following fields for each project participant: a. Organisation;

b. Email; c. Phone;

d. Mobile phone;

e. Google e-mail (used for Google Hangouts) ;

 EC Reviews

This folder will be used to distribute deliverables to the project reviewers. It contains one folder per review meeting as shown in Figure 6. Deliverables are made available as unsecured PDFs to allow electronic review, and typically the editable Microsoft Word document original is receding in the corresponding deliverable folder under the technical work part of the eRoom.

Figure 6 The folder for the first review located under the EC Reviews top level folder containing subfolders for the agenda, the deliverables and the presentations given at the review.

(14)

2.3 Work package work space

Folders for the work packages can be found under the Technical work folder shown in Figure 7, each of these are owned by the work package leader. This allows the work package to have full control over the subsequent subfolders, and also to move or delete files and folders created by other project participants.

Figure 7 The Technical Work folder has one subfolder for each work package owned by the work package leader. Note that the folder for WP 7 simply points back to the top-level management folder. The project has no policy on how the work package folders should be structured to best support the work in the work packages. However, it is expected that there is a folder for each deliverable and that the folder name includes a reference and the name of the deliverable, for example “D8.1 Project Quality Handbook”. Since the project is monitored by deliverables, and all effort has to be allocated against a deliverable, it is recommended that the deliverable folders are subfolders at the top level of the work package, although an alternative is to create a folder called Deliverables and then have the folders for the individual deliverables within.

2.4 Project calendar

The project calendar supports three views: a. Monthly view shown in Figure 8 b. Weekly view shown in Figure 9 and; c. List view shown in Figure 10.

The list view, in particular, is useful to jump quickly to events in the past or scheduled into the future.

(15)

Figure 8 The project calendar showing the monthly view by default with buttons to change to different views.

Monthly view

Weekly view

(16)

Figure 9 The project calendar in weekly view

Figure 10 The project calendar list view shows all events since the beginning of the project Each entry in the calendar is essentially a folder that can contain subfolders and be manipulated as a normal folder in the list view. It can also be manipulated in the same way in the monthly view by right clicking on the event symbol as shown in Figure 11.

(17)

Figure 11 Individual events can be manipulated in the monthly view by right clicking the event symbol. New events can either be one-off or repeated. Typically the status meetings are repeated events, and also multi-day project meetings and conferences are defined as multiple events. Since it can create confusion if the meeting notes, presentations and photos are distributed over the individual days, it is the convention that these only exist in folders for the first day and the latter refers back to the first day.

Project meeting folders have a special structure with the following subfolders as shown in Figure 12:

 Agenda and notes

This holds the agenda of the meeting as well as the notes taken during the meeting. The official minutes of the meeting consist of the notes and the set of presentations given at the meeting since the presentations contains the technical details whereas the notes record the decisions and actions.

 Logistics and practical information

This folder is used by the meeting organiser to inform the participants about the hotels, the venue, how to go there, and offering links to relevant local information pages like the tourist office, weather forecast, metro system, and similar. This folder also contains a database where the project participants themselves make an entry indicating their

(18)

travelling schedule and whether he or she is available to participate to the meeting’s social event.

 Presentations

This folder contains all presentations given during the meeting and uploaded by the presenter during or after the meeting.

 Photos

Everyone carries a digital camera, and the project meeting and social event and activities are visually documented. This folder is the way to share photos from the event with the other project participants, including those not attending the meeting.

All meetings should contain a list of names of the people intended to participate at the meeting. For project meetings this is typically everybody, but for other meetings and more focused workshops only the names of the people actually attending the meeting should be listed as attendees. The members of a meeting are clearly seen in the list view of Figure 10.

Figure 12 The standard subfolders of a project meeting entry in the project calendar.

2.5 Version control and document reservation

The eRoom supports version control of documents so that there will be no confusion what is the latest version of a file, and what is the version history of the file.

2.6 Mailing lists

Mailing to multiple project participants is done from within the eRoom. The mechanism utilised is sending an alert; then select the recipients or the recipient group (i.e. the mailing list), and finally edit the standard mail proposed by the eRoom by adding a defining subject of the form “HEADS: <subject>” and change the body and copy and paste a signature.

Using the mailing lists of the eRoom has two benefits over locally cached list:

 All users' emails are kept updated so that if a user changes email it is automatically corrected for the user and for all the groups for which the user is subscribed.

(19)

 Users may want to subscribe or unsubscribe to groups and work package lists, and sending an alert ensures that the updated current group of people is reached.

(20)

References

(21)

Contributing partners

Trine M. Seeberg [email protected] Brice Morin [email protected] Ilias Spais [email protected] Garifalia Sebou [email protected]