Research log proposal

Martin Gustafsson martin.gustafsson at chalmers.se
Sun May 20 17:32:50 UTC 2007


Hello everybody,

I would like to suggest a project that could be useful to a lot of 
people, in a context that's a bit off from what web CMS:es usually are 
for. I wasn't sure where to put a proposal like this, but since the 
product is intended primarily for university employees, I figured this 
is the most suitable of the Plone lists. If you think otherwise, please 
let me know.

What I have in mind is a Plone-based system for keeping scientific 
notes. As a scientist, you need to keep a detailed log of what you do, 
of the data you collect and the pictures you take. Today, everybody does 
this on paper, simply because there is no good digital solution. Paper 
logbooks are hard to search, you must keep several in parallell or 
remember to always take one with you if you work in several labs, and 
you can't easily go back and comment or modify previous notes. 
Additionally, almost all measurement data is taken by computers these 
days and pictures are taken digitally. Having pictures, data and notes 
all in one place, searchable and categorizable, would be tremendously 
useful. I have told some colleagues about the idea of setting up a 
web-based note taking system, and they've all been very interested. If 
nicely executed, a system like this could be adopted pretty widely, and 
I think Plone would be an excellent platform to do it.

The general characteristics of such a system would be:
1) Fast adding and editing of content. A lab journal is more for writing 
than for reading, as opposed to an intranet or a regular website. The 
number of clicks required should be minimized, and this area that might 
require some special adjustments.
2) Views that show the full text of each note in a folder, filtered by 
keywords and dates.
3) Pre-defined Marshalling so that files can be uploaded in batch and 
notes/data files be appended programmatically.
4) Simple installation and most special features removed. No workflow, 
events, news etc; everything set up for one-person use.

I have a pretty good idea of what this should look like, and nearly all 
the important parts can be done in Plone. The problem is, I don't have 
the skills to do it by myself without somebody more experienced helping 
me out. How do you suggest that I turn this into a real project and get 
others to join me and help out with the coding?

If anyone here is interested, I would be happy to post a more technical 
proposal, describing how I think this should be implemented. And again, 
if you know of a better place to post it than here, that would be highly 
appreciated too.


Best regards
Martin Gustafsson





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