Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab's content moderation workflow

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Here's how the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab has chosen to moderate its web content. This is one of many possible ways to do this.

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 Community 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.