[ckan-discuss] Moderation Workflow Use Cases?

Sun Dec 2 11:46:33 GMT 2012

> In our organization, a moderator must be able to be notified of new
> datasets, and approved them for publication.  I've searched the wiki for
> documentation on workflow features, includeing the user stories list, but I
> can't seem to find any detailed documentation.  Am I looking in the wrong
> place?

This sounds like something we are currently developing as part of the
new "organizations" feature in CKAN 2.0 (earlier versions of CKAN also
had a publisher or organizations extension, but this is being redesigned
and rewritten as a core feature for 2.0).

I've asked the relevant developers about it, and the workflow is
something like this:

- The CKAN instance has one or more organizations (sysadmins can create
  new organizations and give them names etc)

- Users add new datasets to organizations. At first these are not
  publicly available, only other users who are members of the same
  organization can see them

- Organization admins can make datasets public. They can see and search
  a list of all the private datasets in their organization.

This feature has not been merged into the master branch of CKAN yet,
it's on a branch called 2939-orgs, but I think the plan is to merge it
soon.

It should be fairly easy to add "notification" to this, so that
organization admins get notified whenever a user adds a new,
not-yet-public dataset to their organization. The activity
streams/following/dashboard feature in CKAN 2.0 comes close to what you
want I think.

I don't know about that google doc you linked to. Where did you find it?
Google docs seems to be a horrible tool for managing documents like
this, I can't see who created or edited it or when, impossible to make
any judgement about whether it's complete, up to date, or totally irrelevant.