August 11, 2008 - Guides Call Minutes & Agenda

Present

• Karen
• John
• Carlos
• Caryn
• Ellyn
• Nan
• Andrew

Agenda

• Future priorities for the Guides
• Guides design work - Caryn. If time
  remains (it didn't...)

Guides Future Planning

Work
we expect
to finish before the end of current grant (probably ~12/2009)

• Complete current Table of Contents
• Add User Feedback capability to all guides
• Standardize look and feel of guides (style), ensure
  printability
• Review glossary definitions, add as needed
• Publish in an academic journal
• outreach activities TBD, such as meeting presentations/posters (AGU coming up),
  EOS article (series that MMI might contribute to), tons of others; IPY
  newsletter - we have contacted them in response to solicitation,
  waiting for response.

Future Work

Developing New Content

• Additional guides of the kind
  we have now. This includes tutorials about a general
  topic area.
  • Importance: lowest
  • Difficulty: fairly low
  • Resources needed: depends on
    content of the guide, but
    many general ones could be done with the existing guides group (or a similar
    group)
  • Priority: low
  • Other comments:
    • The workshop team is not expected
      to produce a great deal of future content, and most of what does come will
      be very specific
      and technical.
• Case Studies
  : summarizes the
  experience of someone making a decision or implementing an approach
  • Importance:
    • Are most valuable when 1) it
      is specific enough that someone else can drive their work off
      of it, or 2) *many* case studies exist, so users can see commonalities and emergent patterns
  • Difficulty/effort: relatively high, given that a large number of case studies
    would be needed to have high impact.
  • Resources needed: 1)
    broad involvement of the community, 2) a fairly technical person who
    can write well to "interview" people and write up case studies for them (it
    is probably not realistic to expect the community at large to produce polished
    case studies); 3) some group time to finish a template and entry form (the
    current format is difficult to fill out); and 4) web team time to create a
    mechanism for searching and displaying case studies.
  • Priority: Medium
    • nice to do, but not sure the
      benefits are worth the cost (effort)
  • Other comments:
    • Would need new mechanisms for
      reaching out to and entraining the community to
      contribute
• Narrative "How
  To's": documents taking a reader through the detailed steps necessary
  to complete a particular task, such as how to submit data to GCMD, or how
  to map two ontologies.
  • Importance: fairly low
  • Difficulty/effort: not hard, if
    the person is experienced, though can be time consuming.
  • Resources needed: needs someone with
    expert knowledge of the task; would need to be broader than our current guides
    group
  • Priority: med-low
  • Other comments:
    • While having the guides team
      write detailed how-to documents does not seem like a high priority, it
      might be worthwhile to create a template for these, so that they can be
      produced easily by other MMI members as the opportunity arises during
      their work.
    • Creating new how-to's may be a
      lower priority, but linking readers to the many existing how-to documents
      and manuals was seen as high
      priority
• FAQs: like
  existing guides but *short* - questions that can be answered in one
  paragraph. One idea was to create an indexing list of FAQ's that
  jumps the reader to a paragraph in an existing guide that answers that
  question. So we wouldn't produce a whole new set of documents, but
  provide different access to the material we already have.
  • Importance: medium
  • Difficulty: low
  • Resources needed: existing guides team could probably do for many of the general
    topics
  • Priority: ?
  • Other comments:
• Practical "How To's
  ...": (we need a better name for
  this...anyone?) This is guidance for a relative newbie that approaches
  the MMI site saying "I want to figure out how to handle my data of type X -
  what do you recommend?". It is somewhere between a Best Practices, a Case
  Study, and a How To. It differs from the Narrative How To's in that it
  helps the reader make decisions about approaches - it presents the user with
  the range of decisions they could make. A Narrative How To is much
  more narrow and tells the reader how to do a detailed task once they know they
  need to do that task.
  • Importance: High - would be
    very useful to community
  • Difficulty/effort: High - tricky to
    get the scope and structure right so that they are truly useful
  • Resources needed: needs someone
    highly knowledgeable for each topic - this would need to go beyond our
    current
    guides
    group.
  • Priority: depends if we think
    we can pull it off :-)
  • Other comments:
• Pointers to resources on the
  web: collecting links for high-caliber existing documents
  (review papers, manuals, how-to's, etc.). The value-added here is in
  selecting high quality resources for different topics, not in keeping laundry
  lists of everything that is out there.
  • Importance: high
  • Difficulty: medium
  • Resources
    needed:
  • Priority: high
  • Other comments:
    • Might be biggest bang
      for the buck. Positions MMI much better in community.
    • Need to consider how this would interact
      with References.
    • Can evaluate Drupal's
      ability to cross-reference based on keywords. If we tag guides
      really well with keywords, some of this comes out naturally. So if
      have a guide on vocabs, can have a link that would pull up a list of all vocabs. Discussion over
      this approach.
    • consider Delicious/Connotea/etc. for this, with
      Drupal tag collecting module.

Ways to determine what additional topics need
coverage

• have a person working with each of the other
  activities (workshops, demonstration projects, DIVEs, etc) to identify and
  write guidance documents relating to or coming out of those activities. A way
  to leverage more advanced training materials/guidance we're developing.
  • Value in having a guides person doing this, to have outside perspective, instead of a member of the group in question.
• mine the past Ask MMI! mail archive for questions that
  are missing, or under-represented in the guides. Most of the material included in this
  mailing list will probably be more advanced. Might use FAQ
  format

Other improvements to the guides

• ongoing maintenance of existing
  guides as new standards, tools and methods come along, and old ones go
  • critical in my mind (KS), as
    we can't get stale,but low effort. Poss just check each guide every 6
    months or so to see if anything has changed.
• have a more rigorous editor really
  push on the parts that aren't precise (if factual) or highly supportable (if
  judgmental)
  • John can clarify
    this. (It made Karen grumpy)
• create metric for
  assessing how much guides are being used and how helpful they are.
• add a user feedback mechanism for each
  page
• Consider/Implement Drupal enhancements
  to the book module:
  • Allow searches restricted to the
    guides (right now, the user can search on a term in the whole MMI site, but
    not restrict the search to the guides).
  • a fully-expanded
    Table of Contents – on left menu bar (? Nan for clarification)
• Integrate the
  Guides within Site Content: We
  could make use of the site-wide taxonomies to assign "concepts" to the
  guides. Then, if
  you ended up on a reference on the MMI Site that talks about a concept,
  it could automatically include a link to the appropriate guide
  somewhere.
• Integrate effectively with other MMI site 'knowledge' (i.e. the
  guides reference relevant bits), in both substance and tone (evolving
  their tone, mostly...)
• Integrate Site
  Content within the Guides: We've
  put a lot of work into making the guides readable and understandable,
  but they kind of function as an "island". In other words, I think it would be cool to include
  links to specific vocabularies, tools, projects, references,
  opportunities, etc within the guides - and vice versa.

Additional mechanisms for providing advice (going beyond
writing guides)

• Textbook: Well, we have an electronic book... why not
  a print one? It would be cool to include a CD, with some of the key
  tools/resources with the book.
• A further review article or series of
  journal articles
• turn it into some other formal publications
  (not just book, also 'what's hot' links in other web sites and magazines, and
  other good material)
• provide a for-fee consulting service
  to help projects develop a metadata plan or train staff.
• think as a group
  and predict what is coming in the future of metadata – future
  trends, directions