Posts by Matthew Blumberg

1) Message boards : Promotion : Complete "BOINC Unification" in one website (Message 21297)
Posted 17 Nov 2008 by Matthew Blumberg
Post:
By the way --

At GridRepublic, the community pages are now online (click "community" in the menubar).

As noted earlier in this thread, the essential motivation for creating GridRepublic (and the concept of Account Management) was essentially what John is describing: ' "BOINC Unification" in one website'.

  • With GridRepublic you can learn about, join and manage almost all projects, and all your computers, from a single and simple user interface
  • Now we have discussion forums and open documentation of the sort John describes. (...Technically, our documentation is a wiki. But we've added a nice WYSIWYG editor, so no special markup is needed. Anyone can edit any page; and in principle we could restrict certan pages to certain users or groups of users, though at present I'm not sure that's needed...)
  • We're also expanding into MySpace and Facebook. The Facebook app (in testing, coming soon) will especially be cool: It will bring full "BOINC Unification" into Facebook.

So: Is GridRepublic perfect? No. Is it a solid platform for the objectives being here described? Yes, I think so. And with the help of people here and elsewhere I think we can make it an even better. Please drop by and take a look, and let me know what you think.

2) Message boards : Promotion : Creating a unified marketing effort. for whatever final "brand" BOINC unifies under (Message 20962)
Posted 24 Oct 2008 by Matthew Blumberg
Post:
So at long last -- sorry for the delay -- the GridRepublic Community pages are online...

There's plenty of room for improvement, and still a few rough edges, but I'm excited about it as a start; please drop by and take a look...
3) Message boards : Promotion : Creating a unified marketing effort. for whatever final "brand" BOINC unifies under (Message 20913)
Posted 21 Oct 2008 by Matthew Blumberg
Post:
Ldong, I'll note that at gridrepublic we also have an area where projects -- or others-- can create project-specific content, ex this page this page about LHC

you'll see that it is very simple to use -- there's a WYSIWYG editor, you can insert images and youtube clips, and links to discussions, etc.
4) Message boards : Promotion : Creating a unified marketing effort. for whatever final "brand" BOINC unifies under (Message 20912)
Posted 21 Oct 2008 by Matthew Blumberg
Post:
nicholas, the links work for me -- does anyone else have similar problems viewing our beta site?

(in any case the live site is all..most...there... lost a day due to teething babies... hopefully all will be live tues or wed...)
5) Message boards : Promotion : Creating a unified marketing effort. for whatever final "brand" BOINC unifies under (Message 20821)
Posted 16 Oct 2008 by Matthew Blumberg
Post:
Thanks for the kind words about GridRepublic. Going back several years now, the entire point of the GridRepublic exercise was to provide a central point of access -- a point of "unification" for all projects. A place where it would be point-and-click easy to discover, join, and manage projects from one friendly interface.

As you mention above, we'll be rolling out some community features this weekend, I think (pending coordination of the schedules of the two guys who are doing this work) -- we've got a nicely integrated forum-and-wiki; the idea is that we can have discussions in the forums and then use the wiki to document "best ideas" and "best practices" and to organize group activities in various ways (ex, keep track of organizations contacted, etc).

By way of illustrating what I have in mind, take a look at our beta site --

* Main Advocacy Page

* Online Advocacy Page

[note: the above are links to the gridrepublic BETA site; pls don't add any content at the beta site, as additions will be lost when we migrate to the live site... so pls hold off making additions till everything is moved to www.gridrepublic.org]

But if you browse the pages above you will see what our community pages look like, and also some preliminary ideas about things we can do as a group. The content there is just a start; i'm sure with a group these ideas can be improved and expanded, and with a group we can really make some progress on implimentation.

Also, if you browse the pages you will see that there is the wiki, and also a discussion forum (just click the "discussions" tab; one login authenticates you everywhere, so it's seamless). in this context, i hope to have many cross links, ie, links in the wiki page that say "let's discuss" and then connect the user to the forums (Ex, see the "Let's Discuss" links on the Online Advocacy Page )

So, bottom line, I do invite everyone interested this subject to make GridRepublic a home for this discussion, and this work.

(I'll post when we're migrated to the live site, and meanwhile will stay tuned here.)
6) Message boards : Promotion : Complete "BOINC Unification" in one website (Message 17039)
Posted 1 May 2008 by Matthew Blumberg
Post:
thanks john for letting me know about this thread. of course, the idea of providing a unified interface to the boinc universe is the central concept behind account management. this is why we made gridrepublic.

also, as i outlined at the boinc conference last fall, i am working on some community features for our site that i think are designed to do just exactly what you are describing.

to meet the goals discussed at the conference and outlined here, these features need to be very user friendly, else you lose the potential contributions of non-technical users. doing this-- providing integrated account mangement, discussion, wiki, and fileroom, all with a simple UI -- is hard work, and our resources are extremely limited, so i'm afraid it has taken longer than i anticipated. but i think we'll be online in a week or two.

at this point it will have everything you describe --

* central access to find, learn about, join, and manage participation in all projects via a single login

* access to forums and wiki and fileroom via the same single login (eventually: transparent login to project-server discussion forums, in effect unifying discussion across projects)

...the wiki and discussion forums are well integrated, and the idea is to provide a toolkit for the community, particularly in regards to advocacy activities.

...of course this whole thing will only work with the leadership of knowledgable volunteers; and i hope people here will participate at many levels, and i'd like to extend an invitation to do so.

...next week i'll start uploading the seed content, and after that i'll invite everyone here to come take a look -- i'll invite everyone who might be interested to help us build it out and maintain it; and i'll invite everyone who is interested in the ideas of this thread but not interested in contributing at gridrepublic to let me know why and i'll address as many of these concerns as i possibly can.





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