Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Heroes wanted to slay monster (or just thinking aloud?)

The four links pages devoted to the knowledge domains of Hodges model are I am told quite a remarkable collection for all that to me they are a bit of a monster. Apparently the links demonstrate that there may still be a role for human web-hunter-gatherers. Wikis and social media rely on provision of tools for links. The Twitter community is built primarily on links. H2cm's links are checked regularly, tools make the task much lighter, but ...

Most urls have long lives - a slight tweak and all is well. Some are clearly '404', while a few get taken over and become a cul-de-sac for questionable advertising. I even found one or two being used for promoting candidates in the US election. It would be great to have someone else involved a caretaker just for a category in order to:
  • identify broken links
  • sites no longer maintained or representative of the category
  • any key resources missing (this might include a site you are involved with)
[I do mean 'key' resources]

You do not need to be a subject matter expert or a student, but it would help especially for the following domains and categories:

SCIENCES: anatomy & phys, nursing theory, research, astronomy, health informatics...
INTRA-INTERPERSONAL: psychology, mental health, therapies, philosophy...
SOCIOLOGY: sociology, arts and culture, patients and carers, collaborative computing...
POLITICAL: health policy, standards, democracy, activism, community informatics, citizenry, development ...

To repay your time there are a couple of options:
  • You effectively adopt a listing and I can feature a link with a small graphic to your site at the top of the listing category.
  • At least once a year I would post on the blog an acknowledgment of partners - be they companies or individuals.
OK the above is not hyperbole, but with the current website and hosting arrangements I would have to rely on e-mail to do this with me having to maintain the links.

Enter Drupal....

Considering the future site for Hodges' model I could readily drop the links, but I do feel there is potential here on several levels:
  • educational
  • community building
  • commercial
- and I need to consider the options.

The links would be one way to involve and grow a community. Using Drupal to leverage this there is also the possibility of:
  • voting on the existing categories
  • suggestions for new categories
  • use of mega-menus
  • monitor link usage and reduce the listings
  • use some of Drupal's link modules (or create a new one?)
  • introduce the site and links to the semantic web - RDF
  • start the collection from scratch and have the community submit them
  • - emphasizing basic nursing and social care
The existing pages would also be re-written to utilise CSS and jQuery (as already mentioned on w2tq) it would make a world of difference to have the categories being collapsed upon the page opening. We'll see...

Additional links:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mega-dropdown-menus.html


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kpv23

http://twitter.com/h2cm