Furthering the PKP Community: request for input

[jmacgreg]

The Public Knowledge Project is looking to expand its community of users and developers, and to foster communication between the PKP team and the rest of the community.

Currently, the majority of our interaction with our users involves these support forums, but we'd like to expand the conversation beyond support to development and community-based initiatives. There has been some interest in developing local user groups, which we are willing to facilitate if we can; we have also discussed the option of having virtual user group meetings online, on an occasional basis.

Before progressing, we'd like to gauge the interest for such a collaboration, and get some feedback on how to go about it. If this interests you, what would be your preferred method for meeting and discussion?

Please, give us your feedback, and we'll see what we can do.

[ramon]

Hello PKPers,

This would be an excellent time to use Community Software, or even Distance Learning Software, such as Moodle, which allows not only forum-based communication, but more interactive discussions via its own chat.

It would also allow PKP to create lessons, so that other developers can build their knowledge, especially in creating Plugins through tutorials and lessons.

At IBICT we are beginning to discuss replacing local on-site training sessions for virtual sessions. These would greatly improve our impact and reach, as well as make it easier for disabled users to learn how to use the software. Maintaining content and lessons would be much easier as well.
For a limited training staff that we have, this will surely be a step forward.

I believe that PKP would also benefit from using something like this.

Forums are difficult to handle, specially when there are too many questions, sub-forums and few moderators to deal with all the questions.
For users, it is many times difficult to find what you are looking for especially in a different language.

We could discuss creating language-based communities, which would reach greater audiences.

I've also talked about having PKP Chapters (this is something borrowed from religious groups!). Where you may have local chapters of a church to reach more closely to a specific community. In this case you'd have a PKP for Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, French, etc...

It will be difficult though, for these communities to know as much as the PKP Team quickly. The gap between the PKP Developers and the PKP Branches/Chapters has to be very small for this idea to work.

[fgoertzen]

I am a new OJS developer and I was just wondering if their is a published road map for planned features to be added to OJS ?

[jmacgreg]

Hi fgoertzen,

We don't currently have a published roadmap, but we may have something like that after the next release (due in the next little bit). We do have some areas that we'll be focussing on over the next few releases, aside from the normal bugfixes etc., including increases stats and subscription capacities -- is there anything in particular that you'd like to see or hear about?

Cheers,
James