I’m not sure what you mean by activities that “cross ten portals”. The scope of blog entries can be as wide or constrained that any group might like.

That said, you site which is essentially a social networking site for small groups looks very interesting for special interest groups within any organization.

I’m going to test drive it soon but I like what I’m seeing.

I have to warn you though that your description as a desktop app reminded me of Microsoft’s blunder called Microsoft Bob that attempted to map a physical office to applications. It was a bad idea then and it remains a bad idea now. Thankfully, your app dodges that GUI bullet.

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I’m a co-founder of Convos (http://www.convos.com). We’ve built a tool that allows people to setup and interact with simple groups online and through email. We took the approach of having an experience more like desktop software (for productivity across multiple groups) and not like a traditional website.

There have been a number of people using groups for classes, PTA, room parents, team parents, recreational sports teams, families.

We didn’t focus too much on letting personas drive development and instead let real people actually use the tool to build the personas for us.

krasicki: The hardest thing for developers to understand is the idea that you have to lead not follow these days.

Assuming everything goes right, your focus groups will describe what they see in the rear-view mirror. One of the most frustrating and unconstructive things that prevents progress from happening is the meme that our school can’t do anything until we finds out what everyone else is doing.

Today and forever more, technology is advancing faster than society can keep up. Parents may be the most technologically deprived population group because their kids eat every spare dime. Generally speaking they cannot provide the feedback you are looking for.

You development has to be driven by what is on a reachable horizon just to keep up.

rdrunner: Your samples are very helpful. When you built the prototype, did you have a list of needs in mind? Do you know how the school decided what to keep in the final product?

krasicki: Board members received complaints that parents were not getting the timely info they needed. The prototype is approximately two years old and the new website one school year old as of September.

The old site was a static site with lots of links that were largely stale data aside from staff phone numbers. Lots of schools are still there at Web 1.0 – “Welcome to our site, go fish for whatever you need.” Let’s call this a pull-model, the person entering the site pulls information by finding it.

The radical difference in the new model, technology aside, is that the administration and staff are pushing info out every day. The daily schedule is in your face on the front page updated. The critical notices are in your face updated asap.

And if you dig just below the surface, you’ll find some traditional obligatory stuff but also teacher portals, class portals and so on.

The list of needs was culled from Board recommendations such as my prototype, administration, parents, and teachers.

However, at the end of the day, what was produced was a wonderful facelift of the school website that is, IMO, very, very good but…

Our teachers and students are not yet blogging.

No twitter feed of what’s casually happening in the school.

Our yearbooks have not yet become digital lifebooks.

Our students need to use netbooks in class and use collaborative webware to create assigned work with.

Schools still get suckered into bad web software products like the clumsy and embarassingly bad eBoard crapware that somebody loves spending money on and no one seems capable of pulling the plug on.

The scheduling software is garbage as well but is more crapware that no one can get rid of because the school invested in some silly stuff years ago that a few luddites in the system refuse to let go of.

So, as I say, at the end of the day what you wind up with, even with the best of intentions and bright people who can do far more, is a Frankenstein mash-up of old, new, advanced, and sometimes glaringly and embarassingly dumb.

I think a key thing for school sites is the perception their websites present. Schools are generally becoming self-obsolete by not keeping up with the look and feel of the digital revolution. So when the look of you school site has chalkboards – CHALKBOARDS! as a meme we’re embarrassing the school.

Kids are sophisticated and the parents aren’t dumb but school site designers can’t depend on either to keep pace with the kind of future shock we’re in.

The fact that you’re asking good questions in a forum is going to help a lot of people understand the critical necessity of creating a flexible web framework of portals that can be upgraded over time to extend and enhance the initial investment.

My recommendation was and remains adopting Google’s school webware suite as a baseline technology [Too late for us but...]. Links can be found on my blog.

Frank Krasickis last blog post..Punishing Students for Comparison Loan Shopping

This approach of creating personas to help identify requirements is tricky as you have suggested. The challenge is to create composites that allow a collection of stories to be told. These storyboards can then be used with focus groups to choose what to include in the website.

I should also clarify that I am using the term “portal” to refer to a complete website – a collection of the various portals you have referenced (great ideas all). And that a parent portal would co-exist and be linked with portals focused for staff, students, and the general public.

Your samples are very helpful. When you built the prototype, did you have a list of needs in mind? Do you know how the school decided what to keep in the final product?

You’re taking an interesting approach to this but not one that I think will be particularly productive because you’re attempting to identify and satisfy archetypal personalities that don’t exist in the real world as the mean of people who might use such a portal.

Our high school recently redesigned the web site and I offered a prototype based on Web 2.0 technologies that I thought would revolutionize the school site experience.

My prototype is here, though dated:

http://home.earthlink.net/~fkrasicki/eosmith/EOSHome.html

The idea is simply to create sandbox portals for all of the important school categories (Lou is the principal, admins, parents and so on). And each is responsible for the blog entries that feed the portal. This prototype used either stubbed blogs or existing sites that were great examples.

The school did a slight variation on the theme:

http://eosmith.org

In your case I think you want to distinguish elementary, middle and high school parents as distinct interest groups and assign them each a blog that parents can be enabled as authors on. Now doing something like this will result in far more diverse entries than the people you’re attempting to satisfy and that might be challenging.

And maybe include a portal of critical information posts that all parents can contribute to (e.g. poison warnings, hazards, and so on).

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