iframe deleted the page "Your Dashboard"

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Account settings

The Account settings menu option is where you control the global setting for your account on SciSpace.net. Here you can edit your user details, change your theme, upload your site picture, specify friendship moderation, establish moderation of your blog comments, and decide if you want comments emailed to you.

Edit user details

The Edit User Details page allows you to modify personal preferences and settings which affect how others interact with your content in SciSpace.net. The following options are available:

• Your full name: Allows you to change how your name is displayed throughout the system.
• Your e-mail address: The e-mail address to which any system notifications are sent. This e-mail address is not shared with anyone else on the system. If you would like ot make your e-mail address available to others, please use the appropriate section in Profile for this purpose.
• Friendship moderation: This dropdown list allows you to decide whether others can list you as their 'Friend'. The three available options are:
  • No moderation: anyone can make you their friend. This is the default setting.
  • Moderation: you will be notified if someone wishes to make you their friend, and you have the option to accept or decline.
  • Private: no one has the option to make you their friend.
• Public comments: Allows all visitors to the site to make comments, even if they are not logged-in users of the system. Enabling this option may increase spam, so it is recommended that the option be left at its default of 'No'.
• Receive e-mail message: Use this option to be notified by e-mail whenever anyone comments on your blog posts, or to receive e-mail on any discussions you have marked as interesting.
• E-mail notifications: You can optionally receive notifications if anyone adds you as their friend, or if someone joins a community that you have created.
• Change Password: Allows you to change your password.
• Visual Text Editing: Allows you to use a WYSIWYG editor when composing posts and comments.

Changing the theme

The theme that you are using determines the banner image, the appearance of the text and the page layout. If you would like to change your theme to one of the other ones provided, follow these steps:

• Select 'Account settings' from the top right menu options, then select 'Change Theme'
• Next you will see a page displaying a range of public themes
• The 'preview' link beside each theme will show you how it will appear.
• When you find one you like, simply select the radio button next to it, then scroll down and press 'select new theme'.

If you would like more information on how to customise the themes and how to create your own, please see the relevant description in the 'Developers' documentation.

Your site picture

Your site picture is an icon to represent yourself throughout your personal landscape. You can upload up to ten in total, and then choose which one you would like to be your default. You can change the default at any timme, or choose to have no icon at all.

Instructions:

1. Select 'Your site picture' from the menu
2. Access the area titled 'Upload a new picture'
3. Using the browse button, search your computer for the picture you would like to use as an icon.
4. Once you have found the picture you want to use you can now name it, although this is optional.
5. Next you can decide if the new icon you are uploading is to be your default icon or not. This decision is not final - you can alter it later.
6. Click 'upload new icon' and you are done.

Once the icon has been uploaded you have three options:

1. Change the name of the picture
2. Delete the picture
3. Make the picture your default (note: only one picture can be default at any one time)

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Adapted from Elgg documentation

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Ways to use SciSpace

SciSpace.net is a framework with a lot of flexibility. A lot of this comes from the many ways there are to use the concept of 'communities'. Here are a few different ways to use SciSpace.net:

Public communities with open membership

Some communities are best run in both an open and public way. These are typically communities interested in generic science and technique issues. The strength of these communities lies in their wide membership. An example of such a community on SciSpace.net is the Geobrowsers community, which has the aim of sharing information about tools that can be used to visualise environmental data.

Public communities with moderated membership

There are some groups of researchers who will see communities in SciSpace.net as providing an opportunity for 'publication' of their ideas and outputs. This approach replaces what would previously have been represented by a web site, but avoids the overheads of setting up the web site, uses the opportunities SciSpace.net provides for group authorship, and exploits the public exposure of SciSpace.net. One example on SciSpace.net is the Help community.

Private project communities with closed membership

Project-based communities can use SciSpace.net to exchange information, engage in discussion, and share files; the different content tools provide both the essential flexibility and structure simultaneously. SciSpace.net provides the controls over privacy and access that are required for projects that need some information to remain private to members of the project some of the time, but may also want other information to be public.

Small private collaboration communities with closed membership

These communities may be more ad hoc than project communities, and often much smaller. SciSpace.net provides the environment to enable 2-3 researchers to structure their discussions and share data. The example Åkermanite community provides an example of this way of working.

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Elgg editor

Many of the functions in SciSpace.net, including creating and commenting on blogs, and editing wiki pages, use the Elgg editor. This is a window that approximates an WYSIWYG editor.

The window has the following appearence:

The main box is for the text you input, and the buttons can modify the behaviour in various ways.

Editor buttons 

The buttons are, in order left to right:

1. Create bold text (html '<strong>' attribute), as per this example
   
2. Create italic text (html '<em>' attribute), as per this example
3. Create underlined text (html '<u>' attribute), as per this example
4. Create strikethrough text (html '<strike>'), as per this example
5. Left justified text
6. Centre justified text
7. Right justified text
8. Left and right justified text
9. Bullet point list (html unordered list, '<ul>')
10. Numbered list (html ordered list, '<ol>')
11. Insert image with its URL inserted through a window that the button will open
12. Undo last action
    
13. Redo last action cancelled by the undo button (is faded out until there is something to redo)
14. When the chain icon is highlighted, you can create a hyperlink; the URL is inserted through a window that the button will open
15. Remove a link
16. Open a window that allows you to edit the text using HTML (this creates a lot more possibilities)
17. Spell checker, with a selection of languages
    

The combination of the quasi-WYSIWYG buttons and the HTML window provide a powerful set of tools, although users of MediaWiki may miss some of the tools that that infrastructure provides (such as keystrokes for creating headings and tables; these have to be added manually using the HTML editor).

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1. What is SciSpace for?

SciSpace is a networking site for scientists, any kind of scientist, where you can meet people, make collaborations, and find out about other people working in your areas of interest. SciSpace has been designed for the scientific community, by active scientists and eScientists using ELGG technology. We hope that from using our own experiences we have developed a tool that will ultimately work as a one-stop-shop for scientists on the web.

2. What can I do with SciSpace?

SciSpace has the following functionalities:

• Explore the virtual world of SciSpace and discover scientists with similar interests
• Make friends, and friends of friends!
• Join or establish communities
• All communities and people have wikis integrated to facilitate collaborative working in the SciSpace environment
• RSS feeds out and in, and RSS feed aggregator
• Your ability to choose what you have in your news feed on the site
• Making groups to enable access restrictions
• File upload for collaborative working

3. How do I get a SciSpace Account?

Currently, SciSpace is an 'invitation only' community, so that SciSpace members can be sure that the system will not be abused. If you want an account, find someone who has one and ask them to invite you!

4. How secure is my information?

Automatically, any information you submit to SciSpace will be only visible to other SciSpace users.  There is a very flexible set of access controls within the SciSpace setup that allows you to alter who sees what parts of your information.  If you would like to be browsable to everyone on the web that is possible, if you would like some of your posts to be read by only certain members of SciSpace that is also possible.  There is more detail about access controls under Security and access controls, but most importantly you should know that your information will only be disclosed if you should choose for that to be the case.

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Communities

Once you have found others with similar interests - or perhaps you are part of a research groups or a course/class - you may want to have a more formal community setting. This is where Elgg's powerful community building features can be used.

• You can create and moderate as many communities as you like
• You can keep all community activity private to the community or you can use the 'make public' option to disseminate work to the wider public.
• Each community produces granular RSS feeds, so it is easy to follow community developments
• Each community has its own URL and profile
• Each community comes with a file repository and blog

Once a community has been formed, those who join the community can contribute to the collective blog and file repository. This is an excellent way to share ideas and to collaborate together.

Technically, a community has all the same properties and abilities as a user. That means it's got its own blog, wiki, profile, resources and file repository. The difference is that anyone who's a member of a community can upload content to those spaces, and the owner of that community has the ability to edit and remove content.

Creating a community

In SciSpace.net, anyone can create a community.

1. Click on Network
2. Click on the 'owned communities' submenu option
3. At the bottom of the screen is a 'create community' form. You need to give the community a name as well as a username; the name is the full descriptive name throughout the system. The username is the short name that will be formed when you create the community
   
4. Click 'create' to complete the process
   

Access restrictions

You can restrict access to your communities. For example, you might want to vet users before you let them in.

1. Click on your community's profile
2. Select the edit community details submenu option
3. Select your moderation type

Transferring community ownership

Community administrators can change the ownership of a community. Ownership is set from the community settings, and just involves typing the username of the user who will become the new owner.

Ad-Hoc communities

You can build ad-hoc communties around shared interests within SciSpace.net. For example:

• As you fill out your profile, the system will create links between you and other people/resources within SciSpace.net, based on keywords you enter. Selecting one of these links will produce a page with all of the people and resources which share that same keyword. You can then subscribe to the RSS feed that is produced, and can then follow all developments based on that interest.
• You can also use the search interface to find both people and resources for a specific keyword. When the results of the search are displayed, an RSS feed will have been produced. If you put this feed into your aggregator of choice (such as in Resources), it will now be possible to follow all activity that happens on SciSpace.net relating to the specific interest you have chosen.

SciSpace.net makes use of its extensive tagging architecture to create these linkages.

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Content adapted from Elgg documentation

 

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Security and access controls

Access controls are one of the most important aspects of Elgg. This feature allows you to control exactly who has access to your content.

When you create any item of content in Elgg - be it a profile item, file upload, weblog post, etc - it has an access level associated with it. By default, the available options are:

• Public - anyone can see your item
• Logged in users - only logged in members of the system can see your item
• Private - only you can see your item

When you join a community, it will be added to these options. Thereafter, when you create or edit content, you can restrict it only to members of that community. Note that doing so does not automatically place that object in the community.

Security and you

Security can only be as tight as users let it be. If you have content that you don't want other people to see, it is your responsibility to ensure that you set the access control appropriately. Do not assume that the default setting is the one you want – the default setting is "logged in users" for blogs and "private" for wikis.

Creating and maintaining custom access controls

You can easily create new access controls containing exactly the people you want to see items of content; you can create a custom group that only you see.

1. Make sure you have marked the people within the intended group as friends. For information about how to do this, see the Network overview.
2. Click on the Network menu item on the main toolbar.
3. Click on the access controls submenu item.
4. Halfway down the page, you will see a Create a new group form. This is just an easy-to-remember name for your new access control. Type it the name and click Create.
5. You've created a new access control - but it's empty. You'll see your access control represented on the screen with two lists of people; the one on the left is all your friends who aren't in the access control, and the one on the right is members of the access control.
6. Select the access control members on the left (you may need to hold down the Ctrl key as you click), and then click Add selected to group. You can either do this all at once or one at a time.
7. Click on Blog, Pages or Files and add some content to the system. You'll see that under the access controls pull-down menu, Steering committee (or your access control's name) has been added as an option. From now on, whenever you select that access control, only the members of the group will be able to see that content.

If you want to delete users from an access control group:

1. Click back to the access controls submenu item under Network.
2. Find the access control you want to edit, and highlight the people you want to remove from the list on the right.
3. Click remove selected from group.

To remove a group, just click Delete this group next to the access control's name.

You can have as many access controls as you wish, each with as many or as few people as you wish.

How secure is SciSpace.net really?

The answer may come down to the fact that the underlying technology is, like many players in this space, released as open source, with some of the tools being developed by unpaid enthusiasts. No one can guarantee that SciSpace.net is 100% secure, like any other software system.

Because we have no guarantees about security, we aim to be vigilent in checking security regularly. The SciSpace team is looking for information leaks from a variety of sources, and we set up a number of tests of different scenarios. We are also in contact with some of the developers to discuss issues of security. 

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Adapated from Elgg documentation

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The main set of buttons within the toolbar include:

1. Activity - provides a summary of recent posts
   
2. Blog - access to your personal blog
   
3. Files - files (documents, images etc) you have uploaded to SciSpace.net
4. Pages - access to your own wiki pages
5. Network - your friends and communities
   
6. Resources - Aggregates resources
7. Profile - Detailed information about you

The toolbar area also includes the following buttons and tools:

1. Account settings - controls various settings on your SciSpace.net account
   
2. Log off - as per the label!
   
3. Search - search on various tags and names (not a general content search yet)
4. Browse - Browse on users and communities
   
5. Tag cloud - Lists popular tags

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Profile

Your 'Profile' is where you can store personal information about yourself. This information can be private, public or shared with any of your defined access groups.

Your profile serves two purposes:

1. It tells others a little bit about you;
2. The system automatically creates links from your profile to others who share the same interests, likes, dislikes, goals and skills!

Information from your profile is not only linked to other people but also to resources - this helps you find information which could assist with your studies and research!

Profile information includes likes, dislikes, skills etc., and gives you control over who can access this information (we strongly recommend you do not make your email address or home address public).

Once you enter information into the various fields (make sure each item you put in is comma separated), the system will automatically create tags which allow you to see anyone else who has an interest, like, dislike or skill that matches yours. This is great for finding others with similar interests.

Filling in your profile

• Select 'Profile' from the main menu options
• Now select 'Edit this profile'
• You will see a selection of fields
• Each field has a title (for example: 'Who am I?'), a text area, and an access level option
• Fill in the information that you want to share with others, such as who you are, what city you live in, what your likes and dislikes are.
• Beside each field you will see an option titled 'Access level', with dropdown list of three choices: Public, Logged in users, Private. This setting controls who can see your profile items. For example, if you don't want anyone to see your address, set the 'Access Restriction' to 'Private'. (You can also create your own access levels by going to Network > Access controls
• Access levels are also linked to the Access controls function.

Any fields you leave blank will not show on your profile page.

Note: The profile field 'Brief description' is used to populate your sidebar profile.

When you have finished, press the 'Save your profile' button at the bottom of the page.

Importing your profile from another application

Elgg supports the FOAF standard for sharing profile and network information (although it is not continuing to develop in this area). If you already have profile information entered in another application which also supports FOAF, you can use it to populate the profile fields:

• Export the FOAF file from the external application and save it to your computer.
• On the 'Edit this profile' screen, click the 'Browse...' button in the 'Upload a FOAF file' section, and find the saved file on your computer.
• Click the 'Upload' button to transfer the FOAF file to Elgg.

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Adapted from Elgg documentation

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Resources

Resources is an RSS aggregator. RSS feeds are chronologically ordered abstractions of website content that allow you to keep track of new material from a central location. In practice this means you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of weblogs you are interested in, and receive automatic notification of new posts. Most feed readers, including this one, allow you to read an aggregated view of all the content you have subscribed to.

Simple subscriptions

To subscribe to an RSS feed, you need to know its URL. Then, perform the following steps:

1. Select 'Resources' from your toolbar
2. Paste the RSS feed URL into the subscriptions box and press 'Subscribe'
3. That is all!

The system will acknowledge your subscription request and automatically fetch new content.

You can now keep up-to-date on all your RSS feeds by clicking on the 'View aggregator' submenu option.

The 'feeds' submenu option provides a list of all the RSS content you have subscribed to, and 'popular feeds' displays the most popular subscriptions in the system (a great way to quickly see which feeds are popular).

Keeping track of content from within SciSpace.net

Subscribed feeds don't have to come from outside SciSpace.net; SciSpace.net provides RSS feeds for user activity, weblog posts and file uploads; it's easy to keep track of a user's file additions, for example, simply by subscribing to their files RSS feed.

User RSS feeds are linked to in three places:

1. Their 'about me' page, next to their icon (this is the RSS feed for all activity, both weblog posts and profile details)
2. Next to the link to their weblog (this contains weblog posts only)
3. Next to the link to their file repository (this contains file uploads only)

SciSpace.net also provides RSS feeds for tag-based searches, either per-user or throughout the system. This means that you could subscribe solely to files uploaded by a particular user with a particular tag, or files uploaded by everyone marked with the same tag. The system-wide tag-based RSS feeds also let you keep track of users or communities that list particular tags in their profile fields.

What has an RSS feed in SciSpace.net?

• Each user has an RSS feed for all of their activity
• Each tag has an RSS feed
• There is an RSS feed for user files
• There is an RSS feed for user blog posts
• Each community has RSS feeds for files, blog posts, tags and the whole community
• RSS feeds are produced when you search on a topic, to allow you to keep track of all activity that gets tagged with a particular keyword

To find a per-person tag-based RSS feed

1. Click on the tag you want to keep track of from a weblog post or file that they have published
2. Under the search results, a link will appear: RSS feed for weblog posts by user in category 'tag', or RSS feed for files owned by user in category 'tag'. These are that user's tag-specific RSS feeds for weblog posts and files respectively.

To find a system-wide tag-based RSS feed

1. Either type the tag of your choice in the search box or click on it from anywhere you see it in the system.
2. The link 'RSS feed for this tag' appears at the bottom of the screen. This is a link to the system-wide tag-based feed.

Note: RSS feeds just list content which is marked as public.

External content

Highlighting your content from other services (and importing from other blogging tools)

If your external subscriptions are your own content, you can post any new items from your feeds to your main blog. When the RSS feed is brought into SciSpace.net and published to your blog, content will appear the next time you update the source. This functionality allows you to maintain your blog elsewhere and have the content posted within your SciSpace.net community.

To do this:

1. Select the submenu option 'publish to blog'
2. Check the feed you wish to import into your SciSpace.net blog
3. Click update

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Content adapted from Elgg documentation.

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