Bruno Abrantes

Project Timeframe

September 2008 – October 2008

Motivations

The recently established labs.sapo/ua is Portuguese Internet Giant SAPO‘s latest attempt at gaining a foothold in the Higher Education space. The lab is a physical space in the Universidade de Aveiro campus where SAPO supports the development of innovative projects in the Web and Technology fields in tight collaboration with the University itself. In order to promote the initiative building a solid Web presence was top priority. The platform to be developed needed to promote communication with the outside world and shine a light on the various ongoing projects at the lab. With this in mind, me and the rest of the team decided to develop a platform based on WordPress MU that would support an indefinite number of personal and project blogs. This platform would need to be flexible enough to be deployed nearly as-is in a number of situations, such as other Universities or other SAPO sponsored events (as is the case of labs.sapo/codebits and labs.sapo/summerbits).

(…) more after the jump ›

Here’s a presentation that puts in perspective some of he challenges awaiting me while developing part of the SAPO Campus project.

Some early thoughts on this:

The idea to create an open, widget-based platform was very well received. It is as such intended that the development process doesn’t grind to a stop once the project is finished, and that people continue to make new widgets available, allowing the platform to get on with the times.

However, there’s an urgent need to deepen my research on the ways to manage and visualize large sets of news content, and paper-based low-fi prototypes must be developed as soon as possible, in order to settle down ideas and get some early user feedback.

With all that said, I’ve also posted the presentation here, if Portuguese is more your cup of tea.