welcome to the bau-ha.us/
Our goals:
tools and apps to make your digital life
at the Bauhaus University as easy as possible
Start: How to communicate, blog, research, showcase your work and keep track of it.
Communicate
Browse through the Directories to find /People and /Groups or create a new Group if it doesn't exist yet. Groups can either be public, private or hidden, depending on their purpose. Nobody outside a private group can see what is going on inside and a hidden group – hence the name – is not even listed (you can think of it as invitation-only).
Blog
You can haz /Blogs. Also, every group can have it's own blog. For private groups, it opens up a channel to share information with the public. But for every blog with several authors, especially of fluid groups like student initiatives, it makes sense to have a group blog: members of the group are automatically associated with the blog depending on their type of membership. So adding a new author to your blog can be as easy as clicking "Accept Membership".
Research
When a group of people gathers information in a structured way, a /Wiki is often the medium of choice. The medien-wiki is already used by many chairs at the media faculty and we are working on integrating it in an intuitive way. (There is promising code from a similar initiative at the CUNY).
Showcase your work
At the end of the day, documentation is just as important as all the work itself — it's part of it. Because we honestly couldn't find a tool which is flexible enough to implement the idea of documenting the body of work the students, professors and staff at the Bauhaus University produces in a semantically structured manner, we are in the process of building the /KATALOG, a Ruby on Rails web application. It is currently in beta status and if you study at (or graduated from) the Bauhaus-University Weimar you can already register.
Keep track of all that
In trying to keep things nice and easy, there is a /Stream of information which you can browse and filter. Quickly check what happened in your groups or see all new blog posts.
O RLY? WTF? HOW?
- some of these tools are customized existing software (WordPress, BuddyPress on Ubuntu)
- some tools we build ourselves (like the /KATALOG)
- we also try to integrate some pre-existing system (like the the university website and the medien-wiki
- everything we use or build is 100% open source