It has been a long time since Andrea wrote the last of the few articles on this blog. This is also a sign that, in the meantime, as a result of various circumstances, CommonSpaces has lost some of its original spirit as a global, open community. In order to recover some of that spirit and to make this collaborative platform better known, I intend to write at least one article per month. I hope to soon be imitated by others.

This is also my first article in this blog. My experience is that only by using a tool intensively is it possible to identify its merits and flaws and then improve it. In fact, acting as a user is different and someway more rewarding than acting as a developer. Since I am basically a lazy person, and need to be stimulated by others, I will take the liberty of publishing these articles while I am still writing them. I will also open them to comments.

What are minisites

In the context of CommonSpaces (CS), minisites are small 'virtual' sites corresponding to dedicated views of certain communities. They are designed to support medium-size research initiatives.

Minisites are provided by an experimental extension of the CS platform. From a technical point of view, a minisite reuses almost entirely the CS software and relies on the same database. But it enjoys some autonomy as to management, privacy and visibility of contents.

Some examples of minisites

• WE-COLLAB - www.we-collab.eu
  This is the official web site of an Erasmus+ project started this year. It also has the role of integration and aggregation platform for a set of research devices and tools and support services related to learning monitoring, for the aggregation of collected data, for the organization and sharing of project documents.
• SUCCESS4ALL - success4all.commonspaces.eu
  This is a collaborative environment that complements the e-learning platform of an Erasmus+ project started in 2021, addressing the design methodology of courses for students with special educational needs. Among other things, it supports the creation and presentation of course contents being structured as 'learning paths'.
• HEALTH - health.commonspaces.eu
  This is a collaborative environment for the coordination, the sharing of documents and the organization of events of a research project funded by Sapienza - Università di Roma, and set up by the Department of Oriental Studies (DISO). It is a multidisciplinary project that brings together scholars and observers from Asia and Africa, besides Europe, to investigate the changes induced by the Covid-19 pandemic on various aspects of cultural and social life in those continents.
• EUROIDENTITIES - www.euroidentitiess.eu
  This is a web application that has been developed for the Sapienza Project entitled The states of the European Union: identity as self-representation. A historical-cultural, juridical and artistic research on institutional self-definitions, hymns, symbols, monuments, celebrations.
  The data of EuroIdentities are stored as RDF statements. RDF is an acronym for “Resource Description Format”, a language that often is identified with the Semantic Web. The EuroIdentities database is linked to the Wikidata database. Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects, including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and others

Features of the minisites

These are some functional features of a CS minisite:

• it can be accessed with a dedicated internet address;
• It allows easier navigation and search within its dedicated spaces, thanks to the fact that contents of the other minisites are shielded; but public contents of minisites enrich the content shared on CS;
• the community administrator can, on his own initiative, enroll any user already enrolled in CS, thus bypassing the usual procedure based on the user's application and on the acceptance of the application by the administrator;
• the look of a minisite can be slightly customized.

Implementation

In CS, a minisite is built as a Django project, that is a Django app with a distinct configuration file, settings.py. A minisite project shares the commons software, that is the commons app and all Django apps and Python libraries required by CommonSpaces. In the simplest cases, a configuration file, slightly modifying the settings of CommonSpaces, is enough: no extension of the data model is required.