uCampus Release 0.03a

Today is another important day to mark in the weCAMP project history. After 12 working days since the release of uCampusClient 0.02a, Dr Darren Roberts makes Release 0.03a available this afternoon. This version implements User Account Management (UAM) and various refinements to the user interface.

Why User Account Management?
UAM is something that I have always wanted since the old days of SUCoD. It has been widely reported that End-User Privacy is an important requirement to be fulfilled in order to achieve a higher level of usability of an interactive urban contextual modelling platform. Design practitioners are reluctant to make their early design ideas known to the public. They want to try out some initial ideas in privacy until the designs are developed to a certain extent that they are happy with.

What Darren has delivered through the current UAM is exactly the privacy that end users need when performing personal online experiment. A registered user of uCampus will be given a username and password controlled account where all the models uploaded by the user will be hosted. No other users can see these models held in private accounts until the owners of the models explicitly make them published in the "public" domain.

UAM can also be used in team working by a group of users sharing an account with the same usernsame and password as set up by themselves. When this group of users login to uCampus with their joint account, they will be shown all the models they have uploaded as a team.

How well uCampus UAM will be received by the users is yet to be tested. The first weCAMP Project Workshop will be an ideal occasion to work this out.