Create an activity feed for the site
I've heard from users of the site that it would be nice to have a site-wide activity feed to see where the action is. With online communities, it can be challenging to build community in a large number of sparsely populated groups as on the Hub. One way to address this is to create an activity feed that shows "where the action is" and what is going on around the site. Here are lots of ideas on what is possible here. Put in some of your own ideas in the comments!!
Site-wide feed that shows all activity, such as:
- new resources
- new discussion thread
- new posts to collections
- new questions
- new public group
- group announcements
- new events
- new blog posts
It would be great if the feed had a “post” ability. That post would go directly to the feed and, if appropriate, be designated a question, which would put it into the Q&A section of the site.
The feeds should allow for fine-tuning by members - in fact, allow members the ability to create and save different filters for their feeds (essentially different feeds), allowing them to have multiple feeds that give different information from the site. Some examples of filters:
- Allow members to filter posts by groups (easiest would be either an inclusion/exclusion list, or all - no checkboxes, as there are too many groups to scroll through!)
- Allow members to filter posts by tags (could have a “include tags from interests”)
- Allow members to filter posts by other members (same as groups - inclusion/exclusion list, or all)
More rambling thoughts: It would be nice to have a central location where feeds can be created (like on your Dashboard). Then, you can use a macro to display a feed wherever you want. Actually, there could be a feed "store", where members can create specialized feeds and subscribe to them. This information can be displayed so people can see what the popular feeds are. Feeds can be created automatically for groups to show group activity. Feeds can include social media information as well (like twitter/facebook posts). Feeds can be included in a daily email digest. Lots of options here.
Drew LaMar at on
Yet another really great use-case is in groups. Many times people put content somewhere in a group - a post in a collection, a discussion in a forum, a wiki page in a project, an announcement, etc. etc. If a group had a default activity feed and this was displayed by most recent, then they could simply scroll through to find the material and click-through to the appropriate place. There should also be a search for the feed so users can easily find information.
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Hayley Orndorf at on
Feeds for publications would be great! Users could choose which publications to follow and see an aggregate feed with updates about new versions, added materials, reviews, and other activity surrounding publications. Also, it would be awesome to see a daily/weekly/monthly digest for use/downloads of a publication. All of this would be incredibly helpful in supporting the Incubator model. Publication feeds would allow authors to see use and versioning, while users could follow certain publications to stay updated with new versions. Then, we could put in a feed macro to display the feed in an Incubator group for its specific publication.
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Arietta Fleming-Davies at on
I think group-specific feeds, including forum posts, collection posts, and announcements, would be really useful.
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Drew LaMar at on
Going to add another interesting thought on feeds here. Since the group activity feed is becoming more like the project feeds, it would be great if the two could communicate, in particular allowing for the project activity to broadcast to the feeds of groups that "own" them. This would make things similar to Slack, actually, by allowing multiple "channels", where a channel in our case is a project. We could maybe even implement the ability to post updates to project activity feeds from the group feed via handles (like @projectname) or dropdown menus that list feeds from projects.
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Sam S Donovan at on
Ok - I'm going to admit up front that I didn't read every word of what was posted up above. However, that is not going to stop me from commenting ;) painfully aware that I may be repeating something that has already been said.
RT*1 - I think we need to keep in mind that the issues of tracking information across groups and projects is different for us (insiders) than for other users.
RT2 - I'm grooving on the activity feeds within a project. But I think part of the strength in that situation is that I have a sense of the context within which that blurb fits. Are there mechanisms that would help "maintain the context" when activity is being feed from multiiple sources? Maybe there are som parallels to the issues with the discussion digest emails.
RT3 - I'm hearing at least 2 different types of aggregated feeds. One that is embedded in a place (group, project, the whole site, partner page) where the selection of what gets aggregaged is controlled by an "adminsitrator". The other is a "user defined" aggregated feed where they decide what they want to pull together. The other layer is being able to decide which information gets emailed (and when, assuming that we get a digest option).
*Random Thought
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Drew LaMar at on
RT1: Agreed. This is why UX is so important - what would people really use/need? My impression, though, is that any curriculum project that is "large enough" would find use of this, and would be particularly useful for FMNs. Maybe we'll get some feedback from the community here!
RT2: The activity feeds in projects maintain the context by showing the whole thread. Emails updates, however, do not maintain the context, so this is something for development.
RT3: I see it more of 2 ways of using, but in terms of how it is coded or how it is interfaced, I'm seeing them very similar at the moment. The ability to choose what gets sent via email is important.
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