[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Making Evergreen a bit more social

[Dan Scott]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 08:56:03AM -0400, Galen Charlton wrote:
> > Also in the yet-to-add camp is the actual UI for adding a rating,
> > review, or tag to a given item. I've sketched out a rough schema for
> > each, but the schema built in some assumptions that I'm now questioning.
> > For example, I put "approver" and "approval_date" columns on the
> > social.user_review table, thinking that libraries would want to approve
> > every user-generated review before it is publicized, but I'm leaning
> > towards providing a user-flagging mechanism instead (so that users' 
> > reviews would be published immediately, but other users could flag the
> > review as offensive and that would push it into an assessment queue).
> 
> I believe that some libraries will want to manually approve every review before it is published, but I too would prefer that the default be to publish reviews immediately with a mechanism to allow other users to flag offensive or spam reviews - the more responsive the review interface is, the more likely it will actually be used.

So - make the "approval_date" column nullable, and add a "flagged"
column so that we can hook in a "user flagged this review for review"
interface, and add the OU settings so that libraries can configure their
policies accordingly.

(Aside: Kathy Lussier mentioned on Twitter that Evergreen needs a
searchable interface for our OU settings
(https://twitter.com/#!/kmlussier/status/26583906821); +1 to that (I
think Dojo could hook us up with something pretty quickly); maybe we can
throw in links to documentation that explains those OU settings in
context of a given activity).

You echo my thoughts exactly on the needs for responsiveness.

>  Giving the moderation system hooks for dictionaries and filters (e.g., Akismet) would also help address concerns about inappropriate content sneaking in.

Awesome idea! The typepad antispam plugin
(http://antispam.typepad.com/info/developers.html) is licensed under GPL
v1 (!) or later; perhaps there's a fairly large chunk of code that we
can adopt without much pain. /me crosses fingers and hopes for a
volunteer

> >  * Figuring out how to match bibs between systems so that once
> >    everybody has Activity Streams for their bibs, we can start to
> >    aggregate reviews / ratings / tags between library systems
> 
> And this could extend beyond Evergreen libraries - for example, it could be useful to exchange tags and reviews with SOPAC users.

Absolutely - that is actually what I meant. Evergreen needs to make
friends with other library systems, not just Evergreen systems :)