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

[Richard Cyganiak]

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”.

(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)
- enable subdomains such as ie.thedatahub.org as aliases for thedatahub.org/group/ireland
- have a big search box that searches just within the group on the group page (with a look like on http://thedatahub.org/dataset)
- have an “add dataset to this group” link on the group page. Sidebar?
- have some more navigation starting points on the group page, e.g., the Tags + Resource Format sidebar from http://thedatahub.org/dataset
- 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?

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

Best,
Richard