Context of community support in EPOS

Complete EPOS report on Cummunity Support available at: https://envriplus.manageprojects.com/projects/requirements/notebooks/470/pages/42/comments/258/attachments/232/download

Summary of EPOS requirements for community support

Detailed requirements

Training Requirements

EPOS plans to use e-Infrastructures technology (technology to support the training to handle slides, videos, etc.) but EPOS have not decided yet which one is gone to use. The training is part of the EPOS’ communication plan, which is a derivable at month 6.

EPOS wants to engage new scientists. But it is too early to define it. Within 6 months, EPOS will have more details about the community-training plan.  

EPOS will use e-Infrastructure solutions, but they will not be related with the training. EPOS wants to give a training of tools that make use those e-Infrastructure solutions.

The topics (related to e-Infrastructure solutions) EPOS community can be interested are Open-Science and Open-Data.  And the audience will be scientists, IT, Policy makers, ministries, students, and common citizens. The most appropriate method for delivering training could be workshops and webinars. But again, is something that will be described in the community plan. (Derivable in 6 months)

Requirements for the Community Support Subsystem

EPOS support its community by using 3 methods:

• Internal Communication tools:  Taking into account that a) it is difficult to find a pre-existing software package with the aforementioned features and B) that we should possibly re-use tools that EPOS members are familiar with, then the best approach is to manually build an internal environment with a single sign-on which give access to a bundle of tools:

• Wiki: this can be used as a place where information are organized and simple to discover. It can also be used as a blackboard where members collaboratively work (e.g. adding names and responsibilities to a list of tasks to be done).It can be used to keep track of progresses of a task, both for strategic and IT purposes
• Mailing lists & Forums: they are intended to facilitate the communication to and from groups of EPOS members (e.g. BGR, single WPs). Forums and mailing list can be interlinked so that any message in the mailing list is redirected to the forum and vice-versa.
• Files and images repository: a common area for uploading/downloading files and exchanges them with members and stakeholders. Also, it will be a fundamental tool to store and categorize images and other outreach material.
• Shared calendars: to keep track and disseminate relevant events for EPOS members
• Events organization: this is a tool to organize meetings, events and conferences. It should handle all the aspect of a conference/meeting: programme, user registration, deadlines, document submission, dissemination of relevant material etc. Tools like Indico [2] seem to do the job greatly.

• Website: The purpose of the website is to disseminate EPOS relevant information to all stakeholders. The website shouldn’t contain reserved material but only publicly accessible material (e.g. documents and presentations external or internal stakeholders, images for press review).The website should include also news and interactions from social networks.
  The website should be simple enough to allow almost anyone with basic IT skill to add pages, articles, images. A simple CMS is the most reasonable solution (e.g. Wordpress, Joomla)
• Teleconferencing tools: Communication with all stakeholders (internal and external) is also carried on by teleconference. For this purposes some good quality tools (Screen sharing, multi-user, document exchange, private chat etc.) are available. After some year of experience, best picks seems to be, Adobe Connect, Web Ex and Google Hangout

The non-functional requirements that EPOS have are: Robust, fast-react, protecting user privacy, secure.

EPOS is still deciding in what community software/services/applications to use. EPOS uses the services of a private and they are in the process to decide which software to use. 

Formalities (who & when)

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