Attending: Dave Carmichael, Brian Brinegar, Chris Deckard, Hilary Nelson

The hubs are focusing more on social networking features than on the online tools.

They use subversion to track versions of text documents, and are trying to work out how to integrate it into the hub, and how to handle Word docs, etc.

Hubs are currently silos, with not sharing of logins between them.

They've considered creating an engineering hub for Purdue that would be a home for small projects or groups, and this might be the opportunity to create that.

They're also looking to mesh with Facebook - let it handle social networking, but keep the protected stuff on the hub.

The login model might use either Purdue accounts or Facebook APIs - using Facebook would give you the social networking aspect.

They'd be happy if we were to build the Word doc versioning part, and they'd just integrate it and roll it out to other groups.

Right now you ask to join a group, a manager needs to approve you, and then you can be given managerial privileges.

Right now, the hubs are open to the world, and are focussed on a topic or area.

Hubs are Linux, Apache, PHP 5, and Joomla.

Modules are little pieces of a page, components take over the whole page.

Hubs share the same codebase.

5-6 of the components were pulled from Joomla, but they rewrote them to clean them up.

Components build for one hub can be merged back into the core codebase if the hub wants to donate them.

HubZero.org is a full-fledged hub like the others - can be used for testing and for sharing hub improvements, modules, components, etc.

Create an account there to try out the environment.

Subversion: they have a project area for each tool, and they can manually make a project for a particular group.

Subversion might be the underlying backend, but people probably want something more like a wiki, with intergrated to-do lists, file lists, etc.

They'd be happy to have us develop an auto-approve feature for joining groups, because they think there'd be a demand for it.

Hub administrators have a dashboard for viewing pending support requests, abuse alerts, etc.

Group owners get emails for membership requests, etc.

We could start by having a hub set up on their servers, with us having full access.

If we wanted, we could move the hub to our own systems later, if desired.

There could be different levels of trust or privileges depending on whether they have a Purdue/IU account, or just a made-up hub account.

Might be able to add the ability to let administrators bless a hub account to give it the full level of privileges.

Standard hub price: $58,000 per year. Main expense is the tools. You can't get a cheaper hub by excluding the tools, because they are part of the package.

Faculty benefit to sell the idea: one researcher wrote a tool, opened it to everyone. She published 9 papers using the tool, but others wrote 70+ papers using it, all of them referencing her group, so she's got a much larger citation web than she would have had. Without opening the tool to the world, other researchers would have had to recreate her tool before they could do anything with it or publish any results.

CTSI has created the laboratree.org site, which is non-optimal. You get emails that tell you to go to the site, and then you have to log in to see the message.

You need a killer app - something that people really need for their work.

Think about making hub material available on Facebook, iGoogle, My Yahoo, etc. (Couldn't show sensitive data.)

CoE is already part of the consortium, so we don't need to pay any additional amount to have a hub.

The tool code could be pulled out or rewritten in another language, so that the Joomla front end could potentially be replaced by something else.

Once you've authenticated and have permission, launching a tool is just a message to a python middleware layer.