Date: Fri, 07 May 2004 18:57:42 -0700
Subject: Online Community Architecture: Project Plan
From: Cameron Barrett 
To: Mike Liddell

Name: Democratic National Convention Online Community
Short Names: Convention Blog Network, Virtual Convention, e-Convention

Objective: To build a robust online community that facilitates 
multi-directional communication between three disparate groups: attending 
delegates, attending journalists and the American public.

Project Timeframe: 6-8 weeks
Projected Launch Date: June 22, 2004 or June 31, 2004

Description: The Convention Blog Network (CBN) is an online community 
built to allow the Convention attendees to improve and increase the 
communication they have with each other, politicians and the American 
public. Each pre-qualified attendee is give the ability to own a blog that 
covers their particular expertise, subject matter, constituency, and/or 
widespread audience. The blogs, all under the same domain name, 
collectively create a Blog Network that provides a single focal point for 
the discussion, debate and distribution of information about key issues 
relating to their objectives. For delegates, this is their representative 
vote and the constituencies they represent. For politicians, this could be 
an outreach tool to the American public they represent. For journalists, 
this is a way to gather information, opinions and facts about delegates, 
politicians and the American public to enable the stories they want to 
write. For the American public, this is a way to become a participant in 
democracy without having to attend the Convention. Each blog is formed 
around the identity of the Convention attendee. The blogs are categorized 
in the following ways: by geographic location, by special interest group, 
by affinity group.

Back-End: Various solutions exist that can power the back-end to the CBN. 
Our choices are either to go with a vendor-driven solution, modify an 
existing open-source solution or to build it from scratch. The only vendor 
solution that meet sour needs is Six Apart's TypePad service. It would 
need some modification but their engineers are confident they can deliver 
a hosted, co-branded TypePad service in the timeframe we've established. 
The open source solutions are basically Scoop and Slash. Scoop has been 
deployed more often, both for the Clark Community Network and the DSCC's 
fromtheroots.org blog network. My concerns with Scoop are the bad UI and 
the scalability of the code. Building our own solution is the best idea 
but might not be feasible given the extreme time constraints. We're 
looking at going from design to build-out to customization to launch in a 
minimum of four weeks. Unless we hire a very talented developer/engineer 
team that is capable of doing rapid prototyping and deployment this is not 
feasible.

Front-End: The site design is not a problem, as resources are available to 
do this in short order. Depending on the back-end solution, integration 
will take about one week. Integration with a vendor solution will take 
longer because of not having full access to the back-end source code and 
template engine. Interface design, with a vendor solution, is already 
taken care of as is the interaction design. With Scoop, we would have a 
lot of UI clean-up to do. With our own development, we'd have to start 
from scratch.

Categorization: On top of each of these solutions, we'll need a 
categorization layer that allows the end users to locate CBN blogs that 
are of interest to them. With TypePad, this will need to be added to the 
database tables and the customization of the service. With Scoop, this can 
be done by modifying the Bloop code developed for the Clark Community 
Network, which has blog categorization already built in.

Interaction Considerations and Content Review: Only pre-qualified 
Convention attendees are allowed to post to their individual blogs. The 
general user from the American Public will be allowed to participate in 
the comments of each blog, but only after registering first. There needs 
to be a ticketing system for the entire CBN that allows people to flag 
questionable posts and comments so that a distributed team of content 
reviewers can remove offensive and illegal materials.

Image Upload: Only Convention attendees with access to the publishing 
tools of the CBN will be  allowed to upload images to their individual 
blogs. The general public will not be allowed to do so.

Hosting: TypePad is a hosted service. Scoop/Bloop requires servers running 
Linux, MySQL, Perl and Apache.

- Cam