CULTURe EXchange Platform (CULTUR-EXP) project

Joint Operational Programme -BLACK SEA BASIN 2007-2013 CULTURe EXchange Platform (CULTUR-EXP) project kick-off meeting, 26-27 August 2013, Tbilisi, Georgia Cultur-exp project, Tbilisi, 26-27 August 2013

Presentation Overview • GA2. Selection of existing open source platform – overview, planning – R. Kvatadze GRENA, P. Bogatencov RENAM • GA3. Platform adaptation and implementation – overview, planning – P. Bogatencov RENAM, R. Kvatadze GRENA Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Project Platform ? General structure and requirements (as specified in the Grant Application Form): • User presentation module - will be used to create and store platform users’ own profile, the user presentation module will be able to support: • Artists: allow digitized samples of own art, express interest in types and geographical locations of performance events, interest in particular arts or culture areas. • Culture infrastructure owners:inventory of performance sites operated and available to artists, timetable of the events and availability. • Culture operators: description of activities, schedule of planned events. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Project Platform? Event scheduler – a sort of thematic calendar, where platform participants will be able to locate and advertise their events. Culture browser – this module will provide a catalogue and search facility for any type of content on the platform. It will be tailor-made to enable searching the content (e.g. events) by art, region, operator, artist, etc. It is assumed that there will be a possibility to interface with 3rd party systems to provide the schedule other important 3rd party events. Collaborative tools – the popular collaboration tools (videoconference, chat) will be integrated so the platform users will be able to work online for preparation of common events. Announcement boards – a functionality allowing for posting messages, announcements related to culture. Thematic discussion/reflection spaces - where users from different areas, cultures may freely participate and express their opinions on events, art, tradition. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Project Platform? To provide rich content on the platform – by attracting, encouraging and training culture providers to advertise on the platform, and (for some participants) – to provide own cultural content. To ensure the uptake of the platform by the users – by disseminating, advertising, training activities Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Project Platform ? Open source (or any other cost free solution) Web oriented architecture Multilingual, multinational Various types of content (widget, calendar, add, tickets, multimedia files, …) Type and possibility of convenient organization of operating, adaptation and development Having users’ friendly interfaces and simple for take up Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

GA2. Selection of existing open source platform – overview Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Project Platform ? What we want to analyze, propose to install and use: §Web platforms: • CMS • CMF §Repository Platforms § Leading platforms for online communities/social networks § Case studies of similar European Cultural Websites § Analogous sites in Moldova and in other countries of the Black Sea region Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

List of content management systems (CMS)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

List of content management systems (CMS, continuation) Microsoft ASP.NET Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

List of content management systems (CMS) Perl Python Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

List of content management systems (CMS) Ruby on Rails CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

List of content management systems (CMS) Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

List of content management systems (CMS) Cultur-exp project, Tbilisi 2013

List of content management systems (CMS) Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

List of content management frameworks (CMF)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_frameworks Cultur-exp project, Tbilisi 2013

List of content management frameworks (CMF)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_frameworks Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Repository Platforms part 1 Archonhttp://www.archon.org/index.php - Open-source, award-winning software from University of Illinois for archivists and manuscript curators. It automatically publishes archival descriptive information and digital archival objects in a user-friendly website. BePress DigitalCommons http://www.bepress.com/ir/ - Full service, commercial digital repository platform from Berkeley Electronic Press. ContentDM http://www.contentdm.com/ - OCLC's commercial platform for digital libraries. "High-performance storage and retrieval software for multimedia collections". Digitool http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/DigiToolOverview/ - Commercial digital collections platform from Exlibris. DSpace http://www.dspace.org/ - Open-source digital repository software developed at MIT. "DSpace captures, stores, indexes, preserves and redistributes an organization's research material in digital formats." The MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard (HP) jointly developed DSpace. The system is now freely available to research institutions world-wide as an open source system that can be customized and extended. DXLS http://www.dlxs.org/index.html - University of Michigan Digital Library eXtension Service (DLXS) provides the foundation and the framework for educational and non-profit institutions to fully develop their digital library collections. Participating institutions include the National Library of Medicine and The Getty Research Institute. Basic DLXS and searching is open-source and free, but a more robust search platform is available commercially. EPrints http://www.eprints.org/ - Open-source and commercial institutional repository platforms and support. Developed at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Repository Platforms part2 • Fedora Commonshttp://www.fedora.info/Fedora open-source software, a robust integrated repository-centered platform, enables the storage, access and management of virtually any kind of digital content. Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization providing sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital content. • Greenstone http://www.greenstone.org/Open-source, multilingual digital library platform from UNESCO • Hyperion http://www.sirsidynix.com/Commercial digital archive management from SirsiDynix. • Innovative Interfaces – Digital Asset Management http://www.iii.com/products/digital_asset_mgmt.shtmlCommercial programs from Innovative: Content Pro, Symposium, MetaData Builder, Media Management. • InMagic Presto http://www.inmagic.com/products/Presto/index.htmlCommercial platform for managing internal digital assets. • Vital http://www.vtls.com/products/vital/Commercial institutional repository solution from VTLS. Built on Fedora™, this software is designed to simplify the development of digital object repositories and to provide seamless online search and retrieval of information for administrative staff, contributing faculty and end-users. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Enabling deposit, preservation, and access to digital content. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Enabling deposit, preservation, and access to digital content • CONTENTdm CONTENTdm is a digital collection management system and hosting service. • DataFlow DataFlow is a two-stage data management infrastructure that is designed to allow researchers to work with, annotate, publish, and permanently store research data. • DSpace DSpace is an institutional repository system which enables easy deposit, preservation, and access for all types of digital content. • EPrints EPrints provides digital repository software that is intended to create a highly configurable web-based repository. • Fedora Fedora provides the back-end foundation for digital repository systems responsible for managing and preserving all types of digital content. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi2013

Ten leading platforms for online communities • 1. Open source, based on PHP, and a fork of the Mambo project, Joomla is one of the most widely used content management systems and community platforms. It includes the usual page posting, discussion, blogs, polls, etc. Joomla has an extensive community of its own and the number of 3rd party plug-ins is very extensive, with over 3,700 currently listed, making it one of the richest community ecosystems in existence. • 2. Drupal is one of the darlings of the community world and would come first on this list for many in the community business. It's a highly capable, mature, and extremely popular community platform that includes the usual features as well as a workflow subsystem, support for OpenID, granular user security, and much more. Drupal is developed in PHP, is open source, and has several thousand 3rd party modules available for it as well. • 3. One of the older CMS/community platforms, PHP-Nuke doesn't have the flair of the first two on this list but is still one of the most widely used community applications available. PHP-Nuke is eponymously named after the language it uses, is open source, and have several hundred add-ons available for it. Despite being one of the older and more traditional community platforms, PHP-Nuke continues to grow marketshare rapidly. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Ten leading platforms for online communities (continued) • 4. The platform formerly known as PostNuke is now called Zikula and is a fork of PHP-Nuke 5.0. Rounding out the top four, Zikula is one of the older, more established offerings. It is also open source and developed in PHP. • 5. Microsoft's Sharepoint is the first commercial product to make the list and is also one of the most mature and popular. Though Sharepoint can be used to develop collaborative environments that have few community features, the most recent emphasis and the majority of uses I encounter are for community-style deployments. With the advent of the Community Kit for Sharepoint which adds "best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools, and source code", the product is now a capable contender in this space. Sharepoint has very extensive enterprise penetration and will be on the short list for many organizations given that they often already own it, though the warning above about "technology first" should apply. • 6. The first SaaS community platform to make the list is Lithium, an innovative and fast-growing solution for customer communities that is seeing broad uptake according to my metrics. One of the advantages of Lithium is the extensive support around community developers and managers that it provides. One of the disadvantages is that it does not have an open source ecosystem so the the amount of extensions and plug-ins available for Lithium is limited to standard Web widgets. • 7. The second .NET plaform (after Sharepoint) and the first open source .NET community platform on this list, the capable DotNetNuke has been going through extensive maturation over the last year. Written in VB .NET, DotNetNuke has an extensive set of 3rd party modules through its Marketplace service, which enables for-pay modules to be developed and sold, resulting in some high-quality offerings. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Ten leading platforms for online communities (table continued) • 8. One of the few .NET blog platforms has evolved into a full-blown community product. Community Server is now aimed squarely at the enterprise and has been used in very large scale, for example, it is currently used to operate MySpace's customer forums for over 70 million users. • 9. KickApps is a relatively new up-and-comer that is getting wide distribution in a relatively short time period including major wins with large public Web sites for ABC and the BBC. KickApps is a SaaS-based solution like Lithium that is extensively widgetized for maximum integration flexibility into existing Web sites. • 10. ClearSpace Community from Jive Software has been getting a lot of attention lately, particularly with its popularity in the enterprise space. Over 15% of the Fortune 500 currently use it and while it's highly likely that the open source products at the top of this list have higher penetration, Jive has consistently focused strengths in areas where open source products tend to be weaker, particularly on enterprise issues around security, integration, and customizability. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Leading platforms for online communities (continued) We can see how the technologies and platforms shaped up in terms of open source and commercial software as well as software packages vs SaaS. We're seeing a healthy mixture of options available for just about any requirements, though the open source options tend to be richer because of their extensible nature and the large number of contributors building plug-ins and add-ons. • A number of interesting offerings didn't make this top 10 cut and so we thought it would also be worthwhile to be aware about the next 15 candidates since we are likely to see them more often in the near future. They made the list due to overall popularity, innovative features, early groundswell, or a combination thereof: Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Leading platforms for online communities (continued) 11. Mambo - Popular, old school PHP community-platform. 12. Lotus SameTime and Lotus Connections - IBM's answers to community with many integrated capabilities. 13. OneSite - White label, on-demand social network and community. 14. BoonEx - SaaS community that is extensively widget-based with many features and capabilities. 15. Crowdvine - Used to power the community for the popular Web 2.0 Expo conferences, Crowdvine has full community, content management, and external site integration. 16. Facebook Open Platform - Use the Facebook platform for your community with the open source version of the platform. 17. Mzinga - A solution designed for industry verticals such as HR and marketing, Mzinga is seeing strong uptake. 18. Leverage Software 19. HiveLive 20. SocialGo - On-demand SaaS community service. 21. IglooSoftware - A relatively new entry, Igloo is focusing on the enterprise user with ease-of-use and simplicity as a top feature. 22. GroupSwim 23. SocialCast 24. Tomoye 25. Pinax - Brand new and feature rich. Pinax is getting considerable early adopter interest. Based on Python, Pinax is open source. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

WordPress (http://wordpress.org/showcase) Today WordPress is the most popular platform. This is an open-source software distributed under the GNU GPL. WordPress provides a lot of features that allow the developer to quickly and easily manage the contents of the site. These include: simple installation, and publication through third-party programs and services, support for Atom, RSS, pingback, trackback; ability to connect additional plug-ins, a huge selection of many excellent audio/video plug-ins, a huge number of topics on various subjects to quickly change the UI, built-in capabilities to support the sites in multiple languages, and many others. In addition, WordPress includes features such as comments, trackbacks, blogger profiles and pinging services, making it easy to use for the analysis of traffic and control the operation of the site. On the other hand, WordPress is not a «developer-friendly» system. In addition, certain plugins and WordPress updates have more bugs than fixes and may compromise your computer. It is therefore necessary to check the updates for the presence of viruses and read reviews when upgrading or installing WordPress plugins. Overall, WordPress is an effective system for any beginner or an experienced user, which makes it a very versatile CMS. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

WordPress (http://wordpress.org/showcase) Advantages: • WordPress is not just received a reputation for being extremely easy to use system. Thanks to the pre-set templates, you need just a few clicks to deploy a workable website and by connecting multiple plug-ins required, we will get is a full-fledged CMS. In addition, the user is not required to know HTML to work with site. It is an ideal platform for beginners. • Since version 3.0 WordPress provides a very convenient navigation menus that greatly improve the usability of the site. This menu is easily configured, allowing better adaptation to the specific needs of the site. • There are hundreds of free themes that you can use on your website. If desired, you can always get exclusive themes for an additional fee. • WordPress combined with special plug-ins making great integration with search engins with SEO. As a result, your website has a much better chance of getting new visitors through search engines. • Currently, there are about 13,000 of free plugins available for download. This makes WordPress very flexible to satisfy very complicated requirements. Disadvantages: • Unfortunately, not all changes are carried out within the site on WordPress so simple. For example, if you need to change or remove the date of posts, then without some additional knowledge it is not possible. • Despite the fact that there are many ready-made templates for WordPress, some users will want to create your own unique patterns, and you cannot do this without knowledge of CSS. • Versatility WordPress is hidden in the hundreds of available plug-ins. However, setting too many plug-ins can affect the speed of loading pages. Often there are situations when to achieve the required functionality you need such a lot number of plugins that it will be rational choose a different platform. • Frequent updates, which can be classified as disadvantages and advantages to the system. In any case, all updates are intended to improve the reliability, security, and usability of the system, but makes inconvenience to the site administrator. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

WordPress (http://codex.wordpress.org/Hosting_WordPress) Hosting WordPress Most hosting providers and personal installations on Unix/Linux systems should be able to host WordPress under very common configurations. Server requirements WordPress server requirements for Version 3.2: PHP version 5.2.4 or greater MySQL version 5.0.15 or greater (Optional)(Required for MultiSite)Apachemod rewrite module (for clean URIs known as Permalinks) Recommended setup It is recommended to use a robust platform comprised of the Linux operating system, and either the Apache web-server or the NGINX web-server. Almost any server that supports PHP and MySQL will work. It is also essential that the host allows remote connections, for many of the WordPress features to work. If the host blocks outgoing HTTP connections, many parts of the WordPress will not function. Hosting providers Hosting can be easy implemented to realize a host possibilities that supports the above. For the hosting suggestions, please use: WordPress Recommended Hosts - these hosts support WordPress, in more ways than one. Searching the WordPress support forums for recommendations Requirements: PHP 5.2.4 or higher, MySQL 5.0 or higher, Apache or nginx recommended. Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Conclusions Taking in account results of comparative analysis, recommendations of independent experts and (that is important from practical point of view) existing experience in similar systems implementation and hosting we propose the following platforms for future development and deployment: • WordPress- http://wordpress.org/ • DSpace - http://www.dspace.org/ • Fedora Commons http://www.fedora.info/ The proposed list is open for other recommendations / findings. Practical realization of the cultur-exp platform can require to make necessary adaptation and combination of the proposed software systems and solutions. Cultur-exp project, Tbilisi 2013

GA3. Platform adaptation and implementation – overview Cultur-exp project, Tbilisi 2013

Platform adaptation and implementation The activity includes execution of works to ensure realization by the selected platform (platforms) complete set of functionalities specified as output of GA1 - “Platform requirements definition”. This requires to estimate and follow: • Specified criteria • Possible risks • Ability to get expected operational solution • Compatibility/openness for development • Return of necessary investments • … Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Implementation Human Resources Technical resources Platform configuration and reconfiguration Labor expenses, other costs. Cultur-exp project, Tbilisi 2013

Final decision The initial prerequisites to make final decision on the proposed/selected platform adaptation and implementation: • Availability and analysis of the clear elaborated requirements to Cultur-exp platform • Review of proposed/selected platforms to comply with the elaborated specification of the system • Recommendations of the project partners and independent experts • Examination of case studies of similar cultural platforms realizations • Estimation of necessary investments of manpower, technical resources, qualification of the available personnel. • Agreement of all (or majority) of partners to contribute to the proposed/selected platform adaptation, implementation and development • … Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

System functionalities offered by cultural websites by ‚discipline’ The following content operation functionalities have to be taken in consideration for the platform adaptation and implementation: • Performing arts • Visual arts • Cultural and architectural heritage • Literature • Film • Music / audio production • Architecture • Design / furniture / jewelry etc. • Cultural creative industries • "Kulturwirtschaft" • Culturalpolicy • Cultural science / research • Community arts • Museum/Archives • Online-Media • Other art content Cultur-exp project, Tbilisi 2013

Typical functionality of the cultural content collections • Information repositories • Photo / video gallery • Podcast / videocast • Forum • Chat • Blog • Wiki • Rating • Online community • Online content ordering / selling / buying • RSS • Newsletter Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Case Studies of European Cultural Websites(CULTUREMAP_final_report_2010_03_23.pdf) Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Analogous sites in Moldova, example(http://www.fest.md) part 1, Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Analogous sites in Moldova, example (http://www.fest.md) Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Analogous sites in Moldova, example (http://moldovaholiday.travel) part 2 Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Analogous sites in Moldova, example (http://moldovaholiday.travel) Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Conclusions • Work plan for the GA3 activity – “Platform adaptation and implementation” has to take in considerations achievement of the following important objectives: • to comply with the elaborated requirements to the system • to offer expected/specified/requested functionality • to relay on available Human and Technical resources • to ensure realization of effective and perspective solution, compatibility and be open for development • to have perspectives to return of effectuated investments Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Thank you for your attention! RENAM Association http://www.renam.md GRENA http://www.grena.gr Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Case study - summary descriptions (CULTUREMAP_final_report_2010_03_23.pdf) Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Case study summary descriptions (CULTUREMAP_final_report_2010_03_23.pdf) Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Case study summary descriptions Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

Case study - summary descriptions Cultur-expproject, Tbilisi 2013

CULTURe EXchange Platform (CULTUR-EXP) project