Workspace Design Tools and Methods

Workspace Design

Form

The workspace design form is developed by looking at all of the workspaces that we have already created and identifying their 'features'

• Create observation table that identifies workspaces, components and other pieces
• Harvest workspaces, observe what are pieces that emerge as normally present in the workspace

Edit spreadsheet

Patterns Identified

1. Work Group Pattern - AQ Workgroup copied by 3 others
   1. Activities/Events | Active Collaborations
   2. Resources | Get Involved
2. AIP Pattern - CCRM example. Workspaces were initially set up for each group and then the groups used them as they wanted
   1. News/Events | Issues/Discussion
   2. Work Items | Capabilities/Results
   3. Resources | Participants
   4. Each type of content was structured. Sites enforces a hierarchy for pages.
3. Proposal pattern - initially created for NSF proposal. Modified for NASA Roses 08 and the exact same pattern was used for NASA ACCESS 09
   1. News | Schedule
   2. Context | Proposal | Participants/Forum/Resources
   3. Also includes template breadcrumb included on every page of the workspace with links to all other parts of workspace

• All had -
  • Summary or intro to what workspace is about
  • What's New,
  • Resources/Context,
  • Place for Product, purpose of workspace
  • Participants/Get Involved
• Work Items/Schedule both task oriented could be combined?

Function

With the features identified, the function of each component is described and the tools used to create the component are highlighted

• tag for workspace that is used in delicious to collect materials, (method for resource collections)
• RSS reader is a tool used to embed the resources into the workspace (tool)

What's New

What's new is a space to communicate:

• changes to the workspace
• events related to workspace

Need to have a way to archive the news. Need a way to create automatically so that top few show up.

Workspace resources

Each product has associated resources that provide context a workspace has a place to store resources. resources are tagged using delicious and then with an RSS feed they are brought into the wiki page:

• related papers
• links
• datasets used

Workspace Products

The workspace is designed for a particular product, output, goal.

Evolution

the evolution section of the workspace is designed to contain information on how the product grows and develops, to highlight key changes.

Tools and Methods Developed

The tools and methods section of the workspace describe each of the tools created or processes developed to produce the product. Tools may need their own sub-workspace in order

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Workspace-related Ideas

Workspace-related ideas. Tags for workspace and idea are added to each idea page. Create an idea template for the workspace, then use the auto page generator, create another page to show all of the ideas listed. Main workspace page will show the most recent ideas and have link to see all ideas.