LARA discussion

The next major piece of functionality that's going to be added to LARA is a social network layer, partly inspired by Goodreads, that will sit on top of the existing portal and make it easier for people to access LARA content. This will mostly be implemented by Hanieh. I'm opening this thread to collect suggestions. Hanieh does not promise to respond to all of them, but it's very useful to know what people want!

The core functionality we expect the social network layer to offer will be something like the following:

1. As on Goodreads, every user will have a home page and every piece of content will have a home page.

2. Content home pages will let you do at least the following:

a) Read the content.

b) Download the content in source or compiled form.

c) Test yourself on the content, using automatically generated flashcards.

d) Rate the content (assign stars).

e) Post comments in a comment thread.

f) Provide specific kinds of feedback to identify errors (e.g., typo, bad formatting, bad translation, bad audio) which will be automatically fed back to the content creator.

3. User home pages will let you do at least the following, if the user has not listed the relevant information as private:

a) See what the user has read, and how they have rated it.

b) See what content (if any) the user has created.

c) See how the user has done on flashcard tests.

d) See the user's friends.

4. People who are creating content will be able to post collaboration requests - we have found that most often you can't create a piece of LARA content on your own, and you need at least one person to work with you. The most common kinds of collaboration requests are the following:

a) Need someone to record audio in a given language.

b) Need someone to translate between two given languages.

c) Need someone to edit text.

d) Need someone to add HTML markup to text.

e) Need someone to do software stuff (write scripts, etc).

Sounds great. I think (4) should be more give as well as take. Ie as well as saying what you need, shouldn't you be able to say what you are happy to offer - if only in return for what you need?

That seems completely logical!

notgettingenough wrote: "Sounds great. I think (4) should be more give as well as take. Ie as well as saying what you need, shouldn't you be able to say what you are happy to offer - if only in return for what you need?"

I vote for this philosophical "sharing knowledge" approach :) Sometimes giving comes before taking.