Information Radiation in Confluence - Warfighter Made - Part 5

[#1]

One of the best features of a wiki environment and specially of Confluence is the simplicity to radiate and share information within the environment. It is critical and a foundation for the Warfighter Made collaboration platform developed using Atlassian products (Confluence, Jira and Jira Service Desk).

The standard space structure

The overall structure of the Confluence piece is basically simple and standardized to all the spaces created for: Veterans, Volunteers, Sponsors (see diagram below), Service Dogs, Events, etc. It consists in a space home page with children pages built based on a page template. The space home page contains a listing of all children pages with some details and pictures.

 The diagram above shows the spaces structure with the Sponsors one expanded as example. It is the same concept for all of them, a Home page with a listing and children pages with the content, containing key labels so the information can be radiated to other spaces within the environment

To accomplish the goal of standardization I created templates and included the macro "Page Properties" with basic information that I will use later on while building the space home page using the "Page Properties Report" macro and to feed other pages. 

This screen capture shows the Veteran's Home page with the button to create pages, This button is visible to staff members only.

By editing the page you will see the macros used to build the home page.

Image above contains the macro Create from template and Page properties report

Parameters used for Page properties report are straight forward and similar on each case, basically the label and the space name. It is important to use the space name as parameter due to the use of the RefinedWiki theme

Pages structure

Despite the overall design is following the same pattern, the content and the specific structure of the pages will be different per space due to the nature of the information contained. But what all the pages have in common is the Page properties macro that contains the data to be used later on on the home page of the space or in other pages of the environment.

Editing the page of the Veteran you will find the macro Excerpt and Page properties. With those two macros it is easy to share information contained on this page without embedding the whole page. Notice also that I create and identify the label for this particular page. In this case Robert Blanton is rblanton.

Information radiation

At this point you have two elements that are critical for information sharing, Excerpt and Page properties, but the key here is the second one. Why do we need to have this macro on each page?. To illustrate, when the visitor land on the Project page, they will like to see:

1. Project Description, dates,,scope,

2. beneficiary and the involvement of volunteers, sponsors and veterans.

The first one (#1) is native of the page visited, the rest listed on the second group is built based on page properties reports and labels.

The page properties macro containing information about the project. This is what I previously called "native information"

By using the macro I don't need to edit the page to add more participants, just the label that identify the project on the right pages of participants veterans, sponsors, volunteers and beneficiary.

The outcome of the page will easily reflect those that were involved on the project and it will display the selected information from the corresponding page properties macro.

In Summary

By structuring pages with the right information distribution and key macros like Excerpt, multiexcerpt (marketplace) and page properties you will be able to partially share the information of the page without sharing the whole page. As you can see in this example a visitor that initially landed on a project page can end reading about the veterans involved and also about the sponsors supporting the organization. There is more about information radiation that will be addressed on future blog-post. We still need to explore how to bring to this project page the activities from Jira.

More about this project

The goal is to share on this series of blog-posts how we are building the new collaboration platform for Warfighter Made. See below the list of completed and planned blog posts.

• Part 1: Unleashing the power of Collaboration to overcome the Sadness of 22
• Part 2: Onboarding the team to Inspire – Adapt – Overcome
• Part 3: Gathering requirements and using Mock Ups
• Part 4: Requirements and Diagrams
• Part 5: Radiation of information in Confluence and Jira
• Part 6: Empowering the user experience by customizing the Confluence theme
• Part 7: A new theme for Jira Service Desk Portal
• Part 8: User management and qualification from workflow
• Part 9: Hosting an Atlassian Server environment
• Part 10: A 60" Kanban board in a Mechanic Shop assisting veterans
• Part 11: Managing content visibility by user groups

[Fabian A. Lopez (Community Leader - Argentina, Florida, California)]

I am interested on automation for this type of tasks. Any thoughts?