Event displays and experiment updates on the public home page

We have been through many design and prototype iterations over the past couple of months and we are now at the stage where we will begin to build this out in Drupal. We are going to try to have a first working alpha version sometime in February for you to try out. I'm sure that I will regret setting such an ambitious time frame to get this out, but we have some really good momentum going now and we need to capitalize on it.

Some sections of the site have gone through a great many iterations and have changed beyond recognition from the first concepts that Mark published: http://markboultondesign.com/clients/c/cern/public/iteration1/index.html

The 'Physics professionals' page, for instance, now has the more inclusive label of 'Scientists' and the content of that page is still being actively reviewed and will be a complete departure from our original prototypes.

Suprisingly, the home page concept has remained more or less intact from the first proposal that Mark put out and will look something like this:

This page aims primarily to:

• funnel our primary audiences into appropriate areas of the site;
• give status updates.

In terms of getting primary audiences to the information that they need, the global navigation is intended for the audience categories that emerged from the surveys that we ran over the summer. Footer navigation will be provided for core audiences such as jobseekers and industry that various constituents at CERN need to target.

The design principle that underpins the homepage is to create a sense of wonder.

We know that the general public - 'Joanne' is the persona we created that matches this audience profile - tends to get information and news about CERN from traditional media outlets and not directly from the CERN website. When Joanne does visit the CERN site we aim to:

• Give her a sense of wonder about the research that takes place at CERN, to inspire her to learn more.
• Offer a cursory glimpse of what is happening with the research programme CERN at the moment and offer hooks for her to learn more.
• Strengthen the awareness of the rich research programme at CERN beyond the LHC.

We have been meeting with a number of LHC and non-LHC experiments over the past couple of weeks to try to define what type of status data and event displays we can pull in to the home page to give this sense of immediacy and timely updates and the page breaks down like this:

The updates panel on the right of the page will be populated by content curated by the communications group, but we are looking at workflows that would potentially allow anyone from CERN to submit updates for inclusion here.

The accelerator status panel will have automated data about the accelerator chain showing basic status (on / off, or beam / no beam) for various parts of the accelerator complex. A more informative version of this panel will be available on the 'Scientists' page.

The experiment status will show details about the current status of a single experiment (selected at random, on page load with the option for the user to view others). Experiments will have a status update tool through which they can submit their latest updates on operations, data taking and commissioning and upgrades.

The most visually striking aspect of the page will be recent event displays from experiments. There will be two methods for experiments to submit these:

• manually by using a form online;
• by exposing a feed in a structured format.

Silvia has some documentation on the format required for the event display feed here: http://casa-dev.web.cern.ch/node/7

If you work on a CERN experiment and want more information on how you can send event displays and status updates to the new home page, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me or Silvia. It would be great to have a number of experiments on board for February's alpha relase.

Once event displays are aggregated we will have to work on the workflows that determine what gets published and when. We will also have to work on various override states (such as live events such as this week's Higgs update seminar, or long shutdown periods) – we will work on these once the alpha release is out and we can begin to see how the system works with real event data.

So these are some of the things that we have been working over these past weeks. As ever, your thoughts and comments are welcome via the comment form below.