Indaba Platform: Builder Tool Overview

Welcome to the Indaba fieldwork platform. This document provides an overview of the system’s Builder tool. Related documents are at the Indaba Help Desk

Concepts

Indaba is a collaboration tool for people creating and publishing information. Successful collaboration requires three core abilities:

• You know who you’re working with and can communicate with them.

• You have access to the documents and help you need to get work done.

• You know what to do next, and are accountable for doing it.

In technical terms, these are called relationship management, knowledge management and project management. Indaba attempts to solve all three in the context of a specific project. The Indaba platform is used to plan projects, execute fieldwork, and publish the results. These functions are accomplished by the three software core applications that comprise Indaba: Designer, Builder and Publisher. This document is an overview of the Builder application, which is used to execute fieldwork and create content.

Your Assignments

To get started, you’ll get a user name and password via email, which you can use to log into the system at http://indabaplatform.com

When you log in, you will see bright yellow box labeled “Your Assignments”. This is the most important box in the whole system. This is where you do work.

When you have a task assigned to you during a project – to write, review, or edit something – a link will appear in that box yellow box that will take you straight to your assignment. Clicking on this link is the only way to work on your assignment. Other parts of the system let you see content you have already created (such as the “Your Content” box) but only the yellow “Your Assignments” box links to the tools used to complete assignments. If you get lost, you can always get back to “Your Assignments” by clicking the Indaba logo in the top left corner of every page to return to the system homepage.

Getting Around

Indaba is organized into gray boxes which you can expand or contract by clicking on the title of the box. Try it! You’ll need to do this to open some of the tools to complete your work, like a “Staff / Author Discussion” box. Indaba has tabs that organize related boxes by topic. Each tab has several related boxes. Not all tabs are available to all users; managers or editors will see more options than field staff. Tabs include:

• CASES — The case manager is a way to transparently solve complex problems with fieldwork. For instance, you might send a site mail to your manager to suggest a problem you are having with scoring an indicator; your manager might then open a Case to track the discussion and resolution of that scoring issue. Managers will be able to open cases and attach content and users to it. If you are attached to the case (because you reported the problem, for example), you will be able to see who is working on it, and if the problem is resolved.
• PEOPLE — This allows you to find your manager in the “People You Should Know” box. It may also allow you to find other users, depending on how the project is set up. You can click on a person’s name to see their bio or send them a sitemail.
• MESSAGING — This includes Your Inbox, which works like an email inbox for your sitemail messages. Sitemail is a basic Indaba-specific messaging system that can forward system alerts and messages to your email. You will sometimes get sitemails from Indaba Robot when they system sends reminder messages to you about upcoming deadlines or confirms receipt of your material. The Messaging tab also includes an inbox for Project Updates. These are messages sent to all contributors on a project, usually by the Indaba Robot or a project manager.
• A special note about system messages and alerts: Indaba relies heavily on automated messages sent from Indaba Robot as the primary means of notifying you that you have a new assignment (under Your Assignments) to work on. If your email system uses a spam filter, it is very important that you add indaba@indabaplatform.com to your “Safe Senders” list in order to avoid those messages being diverted from your inbox. Otherwise, you may miss important deadlines for submitting or reviewing content because you never received the alert message from Indaba Robot.
• HELP — If you need help with your work, or the Indaba platform, the Help tab has instructions for how to do that.

Everything Else

From the Your Content tab, you’ll see the all-important Your Assignments box. Below that you’ll a list of open cases related to you (this will often be empty). Below that you’ll see a box called Your Content. This lets you see the progress on each piece of content that you are assigned to work on even if you are currently not required to focus on it (another colleague is likely working on it). To do work, you still use the yellow Your Assignments box. The Your Content box simply gives you visibility into the work others are performing as your work moves towards publication. See “Appendix: Symbols Explained” below for more detail, but in general, green squares mean progress has been achieved and red squares mean something is stuck.

An Open Platform

While Indaba builds on Global Integrity’s eight years of experience in building fieldwork tools, it is a flexible platform open to use by partner organizations and other institutions. To learn more about our plans for the Indaba platform, see http://getindaba.org. If you know of projects which could benefit from Indaba, we would appreciate an introduction. You can email info@getindaba.org or send Jonathan Eyler-Werve a sitemail.

Appendix: Symbols Explained

People Status icons: Next to an assignment link you will see a colored icon that looks like a person’s outline. This is used to represent a users’ level of progress with an assignment. If a user has not logged into Indaba, the icon is gray. Logging in, clicking the assignment link, and actually typing in content will help advance the icon to a happy green state (the higher the number in the icon, the higher the level of progress). Next to the people icon is a estimate of the percentage completion of that assignment. These are basic estimates that ignore your efforts offline; don’t be offended if it doesn’t reflect how much work you’ve actually done! Document Status icons: The colored boxes labeled “Status” tell you how far a document has moved through it’s workflow. More green boxes means more work has been accomplished.

• Gray — Work not started

• Gray/Red — Work waiting to be assigned

• Green/Gray — Work in progress

• Red — Work is overdue

• Green — Work is complete

History chart: In the “Your Content” box and others, there is a small icon labeled “History”. Clicking on this chart pulls up a time line of the actual history of that document (in green), alongside a projection of when that document will complete (in gray). The projection is based on the assumption that everyone turns in their work on their exact due date; your results may vary. Related documents are at the Indaba Help Desk