Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab's content moderation workflow

Here's how the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab has chosen to moderate its content.

The core volunteers at the CUCFabLab agreed on the following points:

• The Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab has education as its primary mission, and the needs of adult hobbyists/crafters as a secondary mission.
• We want everyone, including school kids who may not have the public image of the Fab Lab in mind, to be producing content.
• We want a responsible adult to review the content for readability and appropriateness before it's published to the world.
• Any kind of project writeup, from a picture and a paragraph, to a full technical treatise looks good on the website.
• Anyone who isn't comfortable using a CMS is welcome to just e-mail the web admin with any content he/she would like to have posted.

The volunteer web administrator chose the following solution:

• Drupal CMS, since several members of the CUCFabLab and several of the Fab Labs that we talk with on a regular basis are familiar with it. The following Drupal modules are used, in addition to the usual core modules:
  • Workflow
  • Triggers
• Anyone who's ever visited the Fab Lab can have an account on the website, and can create content.
• The following Druap roles were defined:
  • Authenticated User: anyone and everyone who has ever visited the CUCFabLab
  • Editor: Core volunteers who can edit and organize all content on the site, and who can approve/deny users and content. They cannot alter the underlying structure of the site.
  • Administrator: The web administrator. 1-2 core volunteers with web-administration experience. Can alter the structure of the web site.
• The Drupal Workflow module, which provides a finite state machine that is coupled with Drupal's built-in Role Based Access Control system. The following workflow states are applied to all content that users create on the website:
  • "Private Draft": The default state for any page. The user can edit the page privately as much or as little as he/she desires.
  • "Published: World - Waiting for Review": When the author moves a page in to this state, an e-mail is sent to the CUCFabLab IT Committee listserv (via the Triggers module), notifying the committee that new content is waiting for review.
  • "Published: World": The content is now viewable to any visitor to the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab website, and is syndicated out to the Fab Lab Global Network and social networking sites via the relevant RSS feeds. Only a user with "Editor" or "Administrator" privilege can transition a page in to this site.

Despite the complex setup, this system is quite simple to use in practice and provides some assurance that the Champaign-Urbana Fab Lab's website always represents its educational/outreach and hobbyist/crafting missions accurately.