[ckan-discuss] Data Hub groups instead of country CKAN instances (was: Re: it.ckan.net - upgrade request)

[Rufus Pollock]

On 28 October 2011 18:06, Richard Cyganiak <richard at cyganiak.de> wrote:
> Rufus,
>
> On 28 Oct 2011, at 16:05, Rufus Pollock wrote:
>> I also mention one alternative that we have been exploring which is to
>> consolidate material in thedatahub.org and use groups in
>> thedatahub.org for language or region specific material.
>>
>> theDataHub.org now has good language support and consolidating there
>> has the advantage of being part of a larger hub with more activity. In
>> addition it makes sense to have datasets from different places in one
>> place (and we're already seeing e.g. italian spending on theDataHub).
>
> Potentially this could make sense.
>
> There are some advantage to separate country-based instances. It's easier to explain, less confusing, and less “scary”. There can be a greater sense of ownership – “this is *our* data catalog”.

Agreed. For the present we plan to maintain *all* country instances
who want to remain as they are (including ie.ckan.net -- btw we do
plan a rename to ie.thedatahub.org with appropriate redirects but I
assume that is no problem).

> (I won't get into the question of multiple interface languages because this doesn't apply to the case of ie.ckan.net.)
>
> Some things that could be done on thedatahub.org to make the groups feature more attractive for country-based catalogs:
>
> - make the group pages more attractive and welcoming as homepages (the main Data Hub homepage does a pretty good job at this now – can the group pages be made more like that? They're quite uninformative and bland right now)

Agreed.

> - enable subdomains such as ie.thedatahub.org as aliases for thedatahub.org/group/ireland

Yes we have fairly old "multisite" idea we could reinvigorate. We also
have done quite a bit of internal work so that much of the logic layer
could just get an extra filter and it would work (tm).

> - have a big search box that searches just within the group on the group page (with a look like on http://thedatahub.org/dataset)

Yes also on the list :-)

> - have an “add dataset to this group” link on the group page. Sidebar?

Good idea.

> - have some more navigation starting points on the group page, e.g., the Tags + Resource Format sidebar from http://thedatahub.org/dataset

Good idea.

> - have the ability to add more “about this group” text. The only place where one can put group-specific text now is before the dataset list. I wouldn't want users to scroll through three pages of “about/FAQ” to get to the datasets. Can the top-level sections of a group's description be automatically turned into separate pages that are linked from the sidebar, e.g., datahub.org/group/ireland/about, datahub.org/group/ireland/frequently-asked-questions, datahub.org/group/ireland/how-to-get-involved, or something like that?

Nice and interesting idea.

> Anyway we'll give this a bit of a think over the weekend.

Great. Could I even suggest, given all your excellent ideas that you
boot a ticket on trac.ckan.org named e.g. [super] Improved Groups and
Multi-site Support where you list above ideas and any more you might
have. I think these are really useful and something we should
definitely look into.

Rufus