Comm ideas from Todd

This morning I went to the GS Leadership Appreciation breakfast and had a chance to speak with Todd Murphy. Like myself, Todd is a current Delegate at Large for Communication.

Todd has two main ideas:

• Accounts, once created, must never be lost
• UNI log-in will encourage use

During this semester accounts have been lost at least once. There has been interesting research done about teenagers having no problem with account loss lately, but that audience clearly isn't the typical GS student. Gslounge should never delete accounts.

Account deletion and other instability are symptoms of both technology and process problems. It seems like current, open source CMS solutions like Joomla are prone to breaking. In fact, the first piece of advice for people installing Drupal is:

"Never try anything for the first time on a live site. Use a test site that uses the same modules and same data (different database)." - Drupal Cookbook

Administering the site without testing or backup is a process failure. Site backup and testing is a development best practice. It and other best practices will need to be defined and enforced in order for the site to avoid downtime as much as possible.

As far as UNI log-in I am meeting with Dean Stellini Monday to meet him for the first time and get the ball rolling on WIND, the technology required to allow UNI log-in. The challenge first is beauracratic: getting CUIT to allow WIND authentication for gslounge.com. The second challenge is figuring out if we need accounts on gslounge.com, and if so, how we are going to handle accounts native to the platform (ie. Joomla or Drupal) vs. accounts native to WIND.

I agree with Todd that the continuity of gslounge is essential to success. I am interested to see how we can make WIND work on the site given the different needs of various individuals and groups who'll be using it.

Thanks,

Brody