Information Processing Society of Japan is the largest an academic conference in Japanese information study sector. They have more than 15,000 members. The aim of the organization is to grow Academic/Technological progress in information processing world. Since the establishment in 1960, The organization have been sharing the information through publishing and other way, such as hosting meetup to provide networking opportunities to share knowledges and so on.
Members of IPSJ hosts study session at the universities they belong. This website for members, “IPSJ study session forum” is to share these knowledges they gain in each universities.
Why Drupal was chosen?
People working in IT sector have a lot of opportunity to learn outside your organization, because industry itself is evolving so fast and people tend to share information and knowledges to grow together. Situation in academic IT area is the same. Reading and discussing things through the certain academic paper, events to share their experiences at the international academic conference. These are happening every day all across Japan but people in the entire community had less opportunity to share what’s happening, that made them difficult to grow the community as a whole.
In order to break through these challenges, the organization decided to launch the website that can organize event information/report and related documents and many more into one platform, also the one that each members can interact with each other based on the group and theme they belong.
There are many frameworks out there that can achieve their goal, but the client was looking for the one that has a flexibility to easily manage the role of the online members based on the groups they belong.
Role assignment flexibilities + varieties of modules that Drupal have can make this happen, so client decided to move forward with Drupal.
Requirement
Role assignment based on groups
In the organization, there are groups such as “Deep learning study group” “3 dimension point cloud processing study group”. And based on this group, they promote events, updating presentation information by study paper basis (pdf, ppt), so client wanted to manage member roles based on this group basis. They also wanted to allow only group member to update information.
Example of groups
Role assignment functionality based on membership levels
The organization has 3 membership levels(roles), “Session study attendee” “IPSJ member” “Event manager”. These roles are based on what your actual role in the organization is.
For example, “Session study attendee” only can access to study paper of the group that they belong to, but “IPSJ member” can access to all study papers regardless of the group.
Examples of roles that each member have
Project goal
The goal was to create handy system to promote what’s happening in the entire community across Japan and provide opportunity to members to share valuable information.
By having many meetings with the client, we agreed to proceed this project to implement these functionalities and much more. This helped client run community with flexibility.
- Role assignment based on group, membership level
- Non-public group functionality
Drupal is the great solution for these type of website
Website like this, such as the site with membership functionality or site for internal use need to organize membership level and also needs role management functionality. In this case, we strongly recommend to build site with Drupal because of its flexibility.
This IPSJ case is one of the example that implemented role assignment based on groups/membership levels, and as you can see, you can apply this concept to other community/business/organization. If it’s university,it might be based on major or department, if it’s cooperate website, that might be “Admin” “Editor” “Reader”.
