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Introduction to CIRCA for committee leaders
CIRCA is an Internet-based collaboration environment used by the GBIF.
It enables a user community, such as committee, working group or
project, geographically spread across the globe, to maintain a space on
the Internet where they can share documents and other information, participate
in discussions, reach each other via email lists, and benefit from a strong
integration of these and other functionalities.
In CIRCA, such a space is called an ‘Interest Group’. Interest Groups are
combined into a corporate CIRCA instance, which has common members and
where users share the same areas of interest. The CIRCA server can support
multiple CIRCA instances, all of them sharing a central user directory.
All CIRCA objects come with a web address (URL). Sharing of
URLs by copying and pasting them in email and discussions, and embedding
them in documents is one key for effective use of CIRCA.
What I need to access CIRCA?
GBIF CIRCA is available at http://circa.gbif.net/gbif/.
In this area, Interest Groups are available for the GBIF Governing
Board, the Science Committee, each GBIF subcommittee and the NODES Committee.
In addition to knowing this addess, the user needs the following:
- Any web browser such as Netscape 4.7 or higher or Internet
Explorer 5 or higher
- An e-mail address
- For some interest groups a User ID and Password can be required.
If a new user has not got a User ID yet, one can be requested via the
'Self-Registration' mechanism available from the above URL, or by contacting
the helpdesk.
CIRCA services
An Interest Group offers several services that can be used by its members.
These can be accessed through the icons at the top of the Interest
Group home page and are illustrated below. Once a service is entered,
additional functionalities appear on screen. The following services
are available (although your Interest Group Leader may have disabled some
of them if there is no data of a particular kind):
- Information: A website within an Interest Group where
information can be provided using multiple hyperlinked HTML pages
- Library: A document archive organised in sections and
with metadata for each document. This is the most popular CIRCA service.
- Directory: An address book tool for managing Interest
Group memberships
- Meetings: A calendar tool for management of meetings
and chat rooms
- Newsgroups: A forum for discussions among Interest Group
members, and an email list archive
- E-mail: A webmail interface for sending email to any
Internet email address and to members of the Interest Group. All
members of an Interest Group can be reached through an email address such
as dadi.gbif@ig.circa.gbif.net.
- Search: Multi-lingual full-text search on any content
you have access to
- Help: On-line help documentation
Access rights
Any content on CIRCA can be made available i) publicly for anonymous users
like on any website, ii) for registered users only, or iii) for the members
of the Interest Group only. Furthermore, what users can do within an
Interest Group can be fine-tuned using what is called 'access classes'. It
is the job of the Interest Group Leaders to manage the access rights and
the access right policy should be decided by the committees. Some recommendations
of these are given in GBIF Document Management Guidelines. However,
CIRCA user interface is so intuitive that end users normally do not need
training for just accessing the documents. Users only see what they
have access to.
CIRCA login information is transferred over an encrypted connection. Optionally,
transfer of contents to and from an Interest Group or the download of
one or more documents can be encrypted for additional security.
Best practices for authors
So, how do we use it? CIRCA is a big animal and nobody uses all its features.
Some hints for best practices on how to use CIRCA for some common tasks
are described below.
Consultation on document: The author uploads a document in
the library, copies the URL of the document metadata page (from the red i), and pastes it into an email
message. The message should include a deadline for comments and be
sent to the mailing list of the interest group, such as nodes.gbif@ig.circa.gbif.net. (All the other
standard GBIF mailing lists are listed in
another separate document.) The reviewers then send their comments back
to the mailing list, or, if extensive comments are made, upload a commented
version of the document into the library.
Caution: Some email clients cut long URLs at 80 characters if the mail
format is "plain text". If that happens, users can not just click the
URL. Therefore choose HTML as the sending format, or send the message
from CIRCA email service.
Hint: If you want to give a hyperlink directly to the document, bypassing the metadata page, copy and paste the URL from the library listing. It should end with "&a=d" , which stands for "action = download". Example:
http://circa.gbif.net/Public/irc/gbif/ict/library?l=/circa_documentation/circa_brochure_final/_EN_3.1.1_&a=d.
Distribution of materials for a meeting: The organiser creates
a dedicated library section for the meeting documents, and uploads them
one after another. A calendar entry is created in the meeting service,
where the link to the library section is pasted. When the time is right,
the URL of the entire library section where agenda and other materials can
be found is sent to the mailing list of the interest group. If the
invitation shall go to the official representatives only, an email is sent
only to their access class, such as representative.nodes.gbif@ig.circa.gbif.net.
As the meeting happens, more documents such as presentations are
added to the library section so that the attendees have instant access to
them.
Document sharing and archiving: Organise your documents in
library so that they are universally available with standardised metadata,
version control, and full text search. See GBIF
Document Management Guidelines.
Discussion on a topic: The contributor sends and email message
to the mailing list. Others respond to the list. The messages
are archived in newsgroups. If the topic is not of interest to most
members, the discussion can be switched to newsgroup only.
Link to CIRCA from public website: CIRCA documents and other
objects can be referred to from public websites like any other web address.
However, be sure to use the publicly available URL instead of one for members,
if available. The latter requires login. Check whether the URL has
.../Public/... or .../Members/... part in it. It
is advisable to link to the library metadata page (the red i in library listings).
Keeping track on who is who: CIRCA has a powerful directory service
which is available for a variety of purposes. For instance, your
standard email application can through CIRCA's standard interfaces connect
to CIRCA and make the CIRCA directory of users an additional address book.
How to do that is explained in the Library of the Interest Group of the
Helpdesk. CIRCA site directory also provides a "who is who" service
where the various roles the users have in different committees can be defined
using a hierarchical model. The
tree can be browsed like an organisational chart. The entire GBIF committee
structure has been modelled in the site directory. Any new appointments
and other changes in role occupation should be communicated to the Helpdesk. However, users should
manage their contact details themselves using the hyperlink to 'Personal
information'. Based on the role memberships, entire committees have
been enabled for chosen Interest Group memberships. When committee members
change, the changes are automatically reflected in all Interest Groups.
Help
GBIF
Helpdesk is available via email helpdesk@gbif.org or telephone +45-35321479.
Documentation, training material, and other helpful content is available
in the Library of the Interest Group of the
Helpdesk.
Acknowledgements
CIRCA is copyright of and has been developed for
the European Commission, IDA
Programme, by the company European Dynamics in Athens, Greece. CIRCA
is available for installation without charge through the licence. Licencees
also get the Perl-based source code that they can modify where needed.
CIRCA embeds Apache, inn, OpenLDAP, and MySQL and can be installed on Linux
and Unix servers. GBIF uses CIRCA through the license of and on a
server of the University of Copenhagen.
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