Introducing Roché Compaan

“I am pleased to introduce technology committee member, Roché Compaan of Upfront Systems. Roché's expertise in software development and Plone and Zope technologies has been invaluable, and Upfront Systems has rapidly become expert in Connexions/Rhaptos development. Over the past year and a half, Upfront built several new lens features used by Siyavula, a proxy-cache to speed up access in South Africa, the new Connexions rating system, and the new Express Edit feature that helps authors quickly check out content for editing and helps readers derive a copy to adapt. Roché's performance expertise and advice led to a configuration change that halved the time authoring tasks consume. We are very lucky to have his involvement in the Consortium and Technology Committee."
Kathi Fletcher -- Technology Director and Project Manager at Connexions

In 1998 I co-founded a software development company called Upfront Systems located in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Very early on I felt myself drawn to the open source movement and thought that this was a very healthy an productive protest against the establishment. I didn't think it was crazy to build a business on open source principles, but my partners did and since 2000 I have been the sole owner of the company.

Around 2001, a colleague of mine encouraged me to look at Zope. It was a web framework that was years ahead of its time. It was a significant departure from the then common cgi style web apps and it boasted an object database, a multi-threaded web server and publisher that could traverse and publish objects. I have been involved with Zope and the community around it ever since, and saw Plone grow up to become one of the major content management systems in the world. Upfront Systems was the first Zope solution provider in South Africa and we contributed a Zope and Plone training course to the community early on. We used this same course to train developers at Computer Associates in New York when they had a brief flirt with Plone in 2004.

About 3 years ago I met Mark Horner, the Open and Collaborative Resources Fellow in the Shuttleworth Foundation. As part of his Siyavula project, Mark was looking for a platform to use for the publication of a whole curriculum of workbooks bought from a private school in South Africa. Connexions caught his eye, mainly because it did a darn good job at producing printed books by using Latex for typesetting. Mark is a Latex junky. So when Latex junky and Plone pundit met, no other framework stood a chance. Admittedly the patience and charm of the Connexions team had a lot to do with the choice to go with Connexions as a platform. Over the past few years we've undertaken numerous 20 hour trips to Houston to scope and plan the development of extensions to Connexions. The extensions helped us present content in a way that is a familiar to South African teachers, while ensuring that the features that we develop are generally useful to other Connexions users.

We were the first external development team that worked on features that would be released on cnx.org itself. It shouldn't come as a surprise that this wasn't smooth sailing in the beginning. But I believe this is exactly what Connexions needed - a remote development team that can help surface development practices and knowledge that were mostly held by members of the Connexions team and not visible to the outside world.

As a committee member I would like to focus on growing the Rhaptos developer community. As a long time member of the Plone community I will naturally look there to recruit developers. At the upcoming Plone Conference in Bristol I will lead a sprint where we will start the migration of Rhaptos to Plone 4.0. Rhaptos is still running on Plone 2.5 and moving it forward to the lastest Plone version would make developing for it significantly more attractive for existing Plone developers.

Looking forward to see you all at the Plone Conference in Bristol!

Introducing the Connexions Consortium Technology Committee Members

Over the next few weeks, the Connexions Consortium Technology Committee members will be introducing themselves on this blog to the wider developer community. The Connexions Consortium is a group of organizations and individuals, including the world's foremost leaders in education, who work together to advance open source educational technology and open access educational content.

The technology committee is responsible for the technical aspects of the Connexions Consortium. Among other things, the technology committee is responsible for the technical development, implementation, and maintenance responsibilities that occur on the Connexions platform. The committee reviews and makes recommendations to the Board about the technical affairs and policies of the Connexions Consortium.

We are lucky to have a really outstanding and committed group of eight individuals on the technology committee. They participate in conference calls together about every 6 weeks, and they provide expert input to Connexions, the Connexions Consortium, and Connexions and Rhaptos partners. I look forward to introducing them to you.

EPUB mobile development underway

This summer Connexions/Rhaptos development team at Rice is developing mobile versions for all of the Connexions content based on the EPUB standard. The development fortuitously builds on code one of our developers created in his spare time, highlighted in our showcase for partial and experimental work, Rhaptos Lab. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation generously awarded us a specific grant to finish an EPUB export for Connexions content this summer.

EPUB is supported by the major mobile devices and e-book readers including Apple's iPad and iPhone, Sony’s eReader, and enTourage’s eDGe. EPUB books can also be read offline on notepads and laptops and the EPUB format is used by accessibility services that enhance content for use by individuals needing assistive technologies for reading.

The new EPUB export will work like our current PDF export system and when authors update any part of their content, new EPUB versions will be automatically created, just like we do now for PDFs. The EPUB exports will be available on cnx.org and will be available for Enterprise Rhaptos installations also.

For developers interested in following the design and development of EPUB, see our development milestone.

Connexions/Rhaptos Sprint Topics at Plone Conference 2010

Connexions plans to organize a sprint on Connexions and Rhaptos development at the Eighth Annual Plone Conference in Bristol, UK (October 25th - 31st). We would like to hear your ideas for topics to sprint on. We also want to know whether you plan to attend the conference this year and would be interested in learning more about Rhaptos and Connexions and getting some experience coding. Our goal would be to increase the pool of developers familiar with Rhaptos, let experienced developers get to know each other better, and explore topics that may become development priorities in the future. Some of the topic ideas we have been considering include integrating an HTML editor that converts to our document XML (CNXML), implementing an existing specification for enhancing member profile pages (Author profiles), migrating to Plone 3 or Plone 4, or working on some aspect of internationalization. Post your thoughts here, email me, kef at cnx dot org, or email our developer mailing list (go here to join). We will send out more detailed ideas in a future post.

Ready for pre-alpha virtualization testers

We are ready for pre-alpha external testing of running Rhaptos on Amazon Web Services. You will need an AWS account. We have tested starting instances from an Ubuntu laptop and from Mac OS X and now we are ready for others to test these initial configurations.

The instructions are here: https://trac.rhaptos.org/trac/rhaptos/wiki/AWSQuickInstall

The following two configurations should work:

1. rhaptos-partial-32 : Rhaptos instance connected to a sample set of data for demos and exploration. It takes about 5 - 10 minutes to build and then another 5-10 minutes for reindexing the sample data set to use the amazon URL your instance is running on.
2. rhaptos-empty-32-dev : A Rhaptos instance that starts with a machine image with system dependencies installed and then builds all the Rhaptos code from a known working release. Takes about 5-10 minutes to start the machine that does the building and then about 20 minutes for the build.
   

Known issues so far: The workgroup links in the left navigation bar have the URL doubled and thus 404. You can hand fix the URL to get to the workgroup. We are looking into this. You will probably find something we didn't.

We are testing the clarity of the instructions, as well as the functionality of the result. We would love to hear feedback on how it goes. Please email cnx@cnx.org with your results and the rhaptos software development list (rhaptos@cnx.rice.edu) (which you have to join first).

Consortium member, Shuttleworth, funds performance improvement specification

Read Mark Horner's blog entry "Connexions Authoring Performance" for the full detail about the specification they funded for improving the performance of authoring on Connexions. Mark is a Shuttleworth fellow and The Shuttleworth Foundation is a Connexions consortium member. They have been using Connexions, developing new features for Connexions, and funding the creation of specifications for new features that may need additional funding to get off the ground

From Mark's blog:

"... the bottom-line is that Upfront Systems have shown that there are massive potential performance improvements (in some cases 5 times faster) for Connexions on the authoring side and analysed what it will take to implement them. I estimate that the total cost of implementing the specification is $7500."

This is exactly the sort of dynamic engagement we hoped would come out of the Connexions Consortium.

You can read the full reports at:

• Analysis of performance (Open Office format)
• Draft specification to develop the fixes to the problems identified. (Open Office format)

Supporting the Life Cycle of Scholarly Work

From research to the classroom

What students are learning today is often the result of cutting edge research in the past, and what advanced students are learning and incorporating is often today's research. So we are making it easier for content to move from publication in open research journals to publication in the Connexion open education repository. We are collaborating with the Public Knowledge Project, makers of OJS (Open Journal System) software, to support exporting content from journals and importing it to Connexions. The two teams are each implementing SWORD (Simple Web Service Offering Repository Deposit) to accomplish the transfer. Connexions SWORD support design is shown on our development site and implementation began in March.

From Connexions to reuse anywhere

We collect all sorts of statistics about use of the Connexions content from Connexions website, but often students and teachers download the content in various formats and use it remotely. Connexions explicitly supports reuse of content inside OR outside the repository. We try to make it easy to use the content in whatever way is most appropriate for educators and learners. But, we still want to know when the content is downloaded. Our current Google Analytics setup doesn't provide that information and so we have updated the code to collect information about content downloads. Testing is underway on the statistics enhancements. As an added benefit, consistent use of analytics across services makes comparisons and research on content usage more accurate.