This post is a open draft! It might be updated at any time... But was last updated on at .
The online version of the SIL Bibliography contains a subset of over 29,000 citations from the more than 40,000 publications representing 75 years of SIL International's language research in over 2,700 languages.
Finding Resources through SIL.org's (as of 2 August 2012) Bibliography can be a challenge at times - Maybe even a time-wasting endeavor. Time wasting because it might not be very useful to consult the online Bibliography.
The challenging aspect which affects usefulness is primarily three fold:
Items known by SIL to have been created by SIL staff may or may not be listed. (The on-line Bibliography is a sub-set.)
Items listed in the Bibilography may or may not have digitally accessible resources.
Items created by SIL staff may or may not be in the bibliography because they have not been submitted to the Language and Culture Archive (managing division of the SIL Bibliography).
The question has come around to: How does a company present its employees? This question is interesting in an SIL web context because there are no less than 5 places, and potentially more, where SIL staff are presented on the web.
Staff is presented in the SIL corporate Bibliography
Senior staff in key leadership positions are presented on a CV page called the Roster
Staff are eligable for personal webspace on sil.org/~/SomeOne'sName
At a special SIL website like SIL-UND staff pages or at some other program where academics are teaching and staff
My wife has been tasked to be the Professional Development Coordinator for the company at which we work. Her task has several interesting things about in the area of data tracking. One question needing to be asked is: “what are the experiences and skills of our current employees?” This suggests that a databases with cross sections of professionally related events, people and skills is needed. These data then need to be able to be viewed by various stakeholders so that the data can be read and analyzed and understood; eventually to be acted upon and incorporated into company strategies for doing business.
One of the things that is obvious from the start is that a web based collection system is need for the data. A storage solution is also called for. And finally an web based analysis tool for presenting the data in a variety of manners for final use is needed.
So in an effort to help my wife out I have been looking a OpenSource implementations of Resume databases and CV building Databases. It has been my experience that when it comes to IT solutions that people need unique implementations and have unique criteria to meet but do not have unique problems. I think I even found a service that provides some professional development tracking called Onefile. But for our company it makes sense to approach this problem with an eye to integrate it with other corporate IT infrastructure, rather than silo it as an outsourced the system.
Summaries of Goals
This effort to take a strategic look a professional development of employees is part of an effort to look holistically at the corporation’s pool of human talent. The motivation is to be able to strategically deploy our skills in a manner where there is the largest return on investment. It is also important for us to be able to present our talented people and the products of their efforts to the world; both for credibility and for marketing.
Difficulties in the business world
There are quite a few legal challenges for companies (working in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere) retaining these kinds of records, let alone sharing them with business partners.
Social networks are notorious for being able (if they are successful networks) pull information from users easily.
Social Network
http://www.boonex.com/dolphin/
http://www.patrick-opitz.com/projects/facelift/about/
http://www.xoops.org/ This is an open source social network which looks interesting but I am not sure how much momentum is behind it.
4.5 out of 5
This social network looks really cool and targets the e-portfolio
http://mahara.org/
The situation though is that everything that goes into a resume or a CV after biographical information is an event in which the person was involved, a skill they have or a resource they have helped to create. So if we could automatically pull information from the events and resources and then organize them according to Who then we would almost be there. (I am not sure how our company is tracking these kinds of information. It is most likely in a MS Word document.)
Events have several attributes one of those is time.
This is course management software: with calendars and DHTML in Video.
http://www.olat.org/website/en/html/about_features.html
NO CALENDAR….
http://www.davical.org/
http://www.bedework.org/bedework/update.do
http://trac.calendarserver.org/wiki/CalDAVTester
So How do we pull data from the container which holds our resources?
Well the container holding our resources is DSpace.
But these options work with wordpress….
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wikindx-macro-plug-in-for-wordpress/
http://wikindx.sourceforge.net/
http://refdb.sourceforge.net/features.html
