More on Portlets

What might differentiate a JA-SIG portlet collection from one packaged with another portal product? Well, for starters, a higher education orientation would be an obvious distinction. I can think of a few useful functions that would no doubt provide value to campuses—simple things like Classified Ads, Ride Board, etc.—and have more relevance than the Cartoon of the Day.

Another characteristic—“openness”—could also distinguish JA-SIG portlets from the rest of the crowd. While openness is not synonymous with open source, it is certainly an important value and design goal for us in the interests of portability and interoperability. The unfortunate reality is that, despite the almost universal adoption of the JSR-168 portlet standard, one portal’s portlets actually have a slim chance of running in another guy’s portal. One reason is the inherent limitations of the portlet spec itself. This has spurred portal vendors to cook in extensions to proprietary services, rendering their portlets pretty much bound to their specific implementation.

The case could be made that these hooks are necessary to provide real utility. Even so, there are probably more responsible ways to architect these extensions than we’re currently seeing—pluggable interfaces, transparency, and good documentation exposing the problem areas, among others. It would be nice to say that the uPortal portlet bundle is the collection that will run best in other people’s portals, some necessary tweaking notwithstanding.

A portlet “style guide” for uPortal—and I hope to see one someday—would encourage best practices and civic-minded behavior so that we could brag about having not just the most useful content for higher education but the most “portable portlets” as well.

Sizzle and Spark

One of the high points of the unconference was a home-grown student portal demo by Collier Jones of UMBC. It isn’t a uPortal implementation, but it certainly grabbed our attention. Collier gave us a taste of what he has almost single-handedly accomplished in a lightening talk, one of a series of ten minute mini-sessions with which we began each day of the unconference. The crowd wanted more, and we made sure that a full session was scheduled later in the day.

The myUMBC portal experience is highly interactive and borrows the kind of Web 2.0 techniques that make sites like digg, Google, and del.icio.us so intuitive and easy to use. For example, content on the site that is most highly rated by users appears on the portal home page, in popularity order. (Less popular content is also displayed in random sequence to give it a chance for exposure.) Most portal content may be starred by the user, which causes it to appear in a Favorites box on his/her home page for easy access. A dashboard lets you know when new alerts, emails, and posts are available. A role button lets people with multiple campus roles (e.g., student, staff) choose the content that they want to work with at any time.

The portal is colorful, it’s fun, and it presents users with frequent, delightful surprises: a hilarious image here, a strange sound effect there. A “Page Not Found” message is presented with an astonished squirrel animation. None of this feels intrusive. Rather, in the context of an application that offers so many rich and useful experiences, it gives the user yet another reason to want to come back.

How did Collier do it? First, he went out and talked at length to as many people as he could—students, staff, and faculty—and he asked them what they would like to see in their portal. Then he started giving it to them. He combined that aim to please with a sense of humor, a strong creative streak, some wicked coding chops, and many long days of preparation.

Fun and enthusiasm are infectious. Put them together with a laser-sharp focus on pleasing one’s customers and magic is made possible.

Portlet Farm

An interesting question was raised at our unconference about how to provide support for shared portlets. uPortal has never had much of a portlet story, which has put us at a disadvantage in portal bake-offs. Other major portals—both open source and commercial—typically ship with a bundle of portlets that will run in the portal’s environment pretty much out of the box. uPortal provides a few useful ones, but not a package of comparable breadth.

On the other hand, we are aware of a number of interesting portlets being developed in the community and it would be very nice if there were a good way of sharing them. What’s more, because of the dearth of communication about who’s doing what, we’ve seen instances of redundant efforts where two or even three institutions wind up working on the same functionality. It would be great to harness those efforts when possible and put our heads together.

The unconference discussions centered on a way to make this happen. We’ve certainly got the resources to offer project tools and communication paths to new and existing initiatives. Expect to see more discussion on the lists about creating a process to provide a sandbox for portlet contributions and to “project-ify” (as Andrew Petro likes to put it) those efforts that develop traction in the community. One outcome of this work could be an ever-growing, bundled portlet distribution that is certified to run with each new uPortal release.

Fluid Rocks

I’m not talking molten lava here. I’m referring to the Fluid project, out of the University of Toronto. Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project to help improve the usability and accessibility of community open source projects. The project staff is focusing on a few such projects in its first year, one of which is uPortal.

Colin Clark, Fluid’s lead architect, joined the JA-SIG Unconference along with project participants Barbara Glover, Anastasia Cheetham, and Shaw-Han Liem from University of Toronto and Daphne Ogle and Allison Bloodworth from UC-Berkeley. Besides contributing to unconference sessions, the group led a “UCamp” on Tuesday afternoon that tutored JA-SIG developers in the methods of user-centric design and involved them in mini design workshops meant to address some real UI gaps in uPortal. A core of Fluid members and uPortal developers stayed beyond the official close of the unconference to work jointly on the designs that came out of these workshops.

The Fluid project is still in its early stages, but the work holds much promise for improvements in web application usability.

I’ve been particularly impressed by the way in which Colin and Fluid staffers engage with JA-SIG. They attend our events, contribute to our lists, and otherwise encourage dialog with developers. Rather than trying to impose “the Fluid way” on the uPortal community, they have become active participants, and the value they bring to us is made that much easier to see.

First JA-SIG Unconference

I’m just back from our first JA-SIG Unconference, and I must say I couldn’t be happier with the way it turned out. For those unfamiliar with the unconference format, it’s a self-organizing event — no prepared agenda or presentations — that becomes the creation of its attendees.

We seeded the content with several weeks of discussion by phone, email, and wiki, and we bounded each of the two days with some organized activities for the sixty or so attendees who arrived at the Rutgers University conference center. After a session of introductions and “lightening” talks — brief, volunteer discourses on just about anything of interest — we spontaneously filled a whiteboard with a schedule of sessions that spread out over several conference rooms throughout the day. We re-grouped at the end of the day to process how things went and talk about plans for the following day.

A few things impressed me the most. One, as I told the group today, the degree of creativity, intelligence, generosity, and collaboration was amazingly high. I’m used to seeing that at JA-SIG events. Still, it amazes me to think about sixty people, a third of whom had never even been exposed to our community, creating this experience for themselves, organizing it together in the best possible way, asking and answering important questions, planning future work together, learning and sharing, designing code, and just enjoying each other’s company–all over the course of 48 hours.

I was also particularly impressed by the motivation and rigor with which our gang made really productive strides towards beginning important new initiatives that had been on the back burner for a long time in the areas of licensing, portlet sharing, LMS/portal integration, and project incubation, to name a few. We left the unconference with a list of follow-up activities and go-to people assigned to them. (A number of them have stayed a few days longer to get some real stuff done.)

I’ll say more about the unconference in upcoming posts, but, in summary, I think I speak for most of us by saying that I’m really looking forward to the next one.

Welcome, all…

This is the new home of my musings about JA-SIG. I’m interested in hearing what’s on your mind, too, so please feel welcome to leave a comment…