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Thursday, 19 February 2009 14:48 |
The proposed Encyclopedia plan is not the only way to move forward with SABR's research, although we feel it is the best. Here are several alternatives (and the first is likely the correct solution for non-encyclopedic research, but we do not feel it's appropriate to try to fit encyclopedic research into that mold).
- Sticking with traditional hierarchical research structure, probably publishing research on Joomla sites
- Pros: Is not a difficult change for the organization, will without question make decent improvements on the status quo
- Cons: Does not offer any new capability, or solve the fundamental problem of making all research act like one body of knowledge (it may get partway there, but could never do as well as one unified resource)
- Going with a similar community approach but using some other software (probably proprietary) that is tied into a larger association-management system (to do member management, renewals, etc, all in the same software package instead of having to tie one to mediawiki)
- Pros: All-in-one packages are easy, staff time use would probably be lower, solves the problem of membership management at the same time
- Cons: The up-front costs of software and setup are higher. Proprietary software is not as extensible. If it can't already do everything you want, you won't be able to make it. Any package we choose would not be as good as Mediawiki. If we for some reason decide to switch to this strategy later, the expense of moving data from Mediawiki would be manageable, but going the other way would likely be harder (so there is no reason to commit to it now).
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Last Updated on Thursday, 19 February 2009 15:12 |
Alternatives