US Dept. of Agriculture's 4-H Uses Zope for Massive Collaboration

The US Dept. of Agriculture's 4-H division supports a quality internet-based educational experience for children. Its 4-H division created "CyberCamp" where children - "Campers" - can participate in varieties of online activities. 4-H collaborated with CYFERnet - http://www.cyfernet.org , CSREES - http://www.reeusda.gov , the University of Nebraska, University of Minnesota, and Ohio State University.

Campers must have a safe, educationally appropriate environment in which to interact, so the system needed flexible, robust security and editorial control as well as extensive delegation of content production, a framework for combining content into cohesive, interactive activities and adventures.

Approach: Versatility is Key

Zope software provides the extraordinary versatility required with its powerful Zope Content Management Framework (CMF) that enabled:

• Membership Model extended to allow a role hierarchy ensuring only authorized people interact with the system. Whether adults are creating content for the site, managing the sign-up of Campers, or leading guided discussions, they have to have been expressly authorized for their specific role(s) before they are able to do any of them. Only children who sign up as members of CyberCamp may interact with the rich content on the site.
• Creation, submission, and approval of the specific content types the CyberCamp staff required.
• Users with nominal Web expertise to create dozens of highly interactive custom 'Adventure' products.

A Role-based Membership Model: Cascading Delegation

The CMF's role-oriented workflow enables custom tailored, effective and secure delegation of responsibility. Site managers assign content managers, who can assign content developers. These roles have a custom set of privileges and menu options that permit the decentralization of content creation work, while maintaining control over that content.

For efficient administration, a separate set of roles was created: State Directors create accounts for local Extension Agents who in turn can create Registrars, who have the authority to sign up Campers. This emphasis on cascading delegation, with layers of responsibility and authority, allows scalable, regulated oversight of user management and content production across large numbers of site contributors. Powerful reporting options are available for site usage, membership and staff demographics.

CMF Unleashes Content

Zope Corporation designed all content elements for CyberCamp, including basic building blocks, composite objects and templates, conditional elements, and entire Adventures, to be shared in content libraries. Shared templates dictate layout and "look and feel" of Adventure pages. Authorizing template development privileges to select content producers means easily enforcing (or opening up) policy about the site's "look and feel" to whatever degree CyberCamp decides.

Developers can knit content elements together into Adventure paths, using a custom web-based Adventure-builder GUI. The GUI includes a self-modifying graphical depiction of the path as it is built, providing developers a constant look at the level of complication in the Adventure they're building. These paths have features like conditional branching, to encapsulate simple logic, as well as content, in the course of an Adventure.

Growing The Content Base

Since all the Adventure elements are part of a shared content library, they are available for reuse. The CMF promotes content repurposing through its pervasive use of standard metadata in the crafting of content elements as well as in the search facilities, minimizing the need to create new content. Creating more and varied Adventures becomes easier and faster as published content elements grow. The site continually adapts to changing educational themes, new content advances, and to Campers' unique interests. Users with minimal Web expertise can build highly interactive Adventures.

Growing the User Base

As the repertoire of Adventures grows, so have the number of visitors to the site and the pool of content developers. Through the security of the membership system, Content Managers and Developers can be added to permit as wide a development base as the staff desires, while retaining control over the content. Zope provides for this growth via access to the content repository using the Zope Enterprise Objects (ZEO), a facility for distributing access to the database for large-scale operations.

Challenges

• Decentralized framework for consistent content creation needed
• Empowering non-technical content authors to create varied content from simple, template-based pages to dynamic, interactive Adventures
• Security! Ensure only authorized site members could interact on the site, and only in their respective, authorized roles.

Approach

• Zope's Content Management Framework (CMF) was extended through custom development to fully leverage its membership and content capabilities

Benefits

• Customer has framework to build a site with specific, role-based access restricted to staff and registered Campers.
• Site enjoys the content variety submitted by hundreds of content authors, while retaining a consistent "look and feel" due to the flexible templates used in this content creation.
• Customer has the framework and mechanisms to create interactive, online adventures limited in richness and complexity only by the imagination of the content authors.

The Zope technology is a mile wide and a mile deep. We now have a cutting-edge news wire Web site that allows us to easily and efficiently share the best work of our newspapers every day while creating an archive of stories, photos and graphics that our editors can tap into forever. It's only going to get bigger and better as our newspapers move to this platform.
- Brad Dennison, Vice President of Editorial, CNHI