Content attribution to Organisations

Goals

• Create incentives for multiple organisations to collaborate on course creation in a Sunbird instance
  • Create the means for an organisation which sponsors content creation to get visibility for their contributions
  • Provide course creators easy ways to 'do the right thing' when it comes to attributing content which they are using

Background

Content which is created in Sunbird has three metadata attributes which point to the entities involved in creating the content

• creator – the is the id of the user who created the content
• createdFor – this is the id of the organisation which takes the responsibility to review content
• organisation – an array of organisation names (not IDs)
• channel – this is the channel to which the creator belongs at the time when the creator last edited the content

When content and courses are displayed in Sunbird, the display text attributes the content to the creator.

Assumptions

• Content creation can be
  • sponsored – i.e. an organisation is paying for a person to create the content
  • non-sponsored – i.e. an individual is creating content based on personal choices
• In either sponsored or non-sponsored case, an entity will shoulder the responsibility for reviewing the content to ensure standards are met
• Multiple attribution models need to be supported. Content can be
  • non-sponsored and attributed to the individual creating it
  • sponsored and attributed to the organisation sponsoring it
  • sponsored and attributed to the individual creating it
• For a course or a textbook, visible credit at the aggregate level (course or textbook) carries more meaning than credit at an individual content level

Proposal

The proposal is to allow

1. display text to attribute content to either the individual creator or to the creator's organisation
2. and organisation to remove and individual's edit privileges when she/he leaves an organisation which sponsored content creation
3. content which aggregates other content pieces to automatically attribute the entities who created those items
4. content copy to attribute the source of the content where it was copied from

Design

Attribution to organisation

1. In order to identify sponsoring organisations, introduce a new attribute in the content model called ownership (see open question below) – the attribute is an enumerated field whose options are creator and createdFor
2. If the value of ownership is createdFor, the organisation's name will be displayed when the content is shown in Sunbird
3. If the value of ownership is creator, the individual's name will be displayed when the content is shown in Sunbird
4. When creating it's framework, an organisation can decide
   1. what is the default value of the ownership attribute
   2. to disable either creator or createdFor as options for the ownership attribute
   3. to enable both creator or createdFor as options for the ownership attribute but choose to give edit rights on that attribute only to some content creators or content reviewers

User transfer between organisations

When a user leaves an organisation (or if her/his creation rights are removed), their creator role in that organisation is terminated. At this point,

1. content objects need to have creator attribute re-assigned where
   1. the user is the creator, but
   2. ownership is set to createdFor
2. the org-admin will need to decide who receives the ownership of such content items
   1. by default the admin will be assigned as the new creator of the content items

Attribution of aggregate content

When a user creates aggregate content by selecting one or more resources for inclusion, the new content will store references to the entities indicated by the ownership attribute of the included resource. The references will be stored in the attributions field.

For instance,

1. Galactic Publishers creates a course on the Solar System which contains 
   1. A resource called Many Moons of Jupiter created by Io Publishing, and
   2. A resource called Many Rings of Saturn created by Weekend Imprints
2. When the course on the Solar System is displayed, the display text will
   1. attribute creation of the course to Galactic Publishers
   2. attribute credit for included content to Io Publishing and Weekend Imprints
   3. eg text: created by: Galactic Publishers with contributions from: Io Publishing & Weekend Imprints

To accomplish this, when the course on the Solar System is created,

1. content stores references to Io Publishing and Weekend Imprints organisations as contributors in the attributions field

Attributing individuals

The example above assumes that the resources included are sponsored and attributed to the sponsoring organisation. If the resources were non-sponsored, or sponsored but attributed to the individual then the reference would be made to the individual as a contributor

Resource Versioning

The reference to contributors will be based on the version of the resource when it was added to the aggregate content.

1. Resource R is at version N where the ownership attribute is set to creator and
2. It is added to a course C, the course gives credit to the creator of R
3. Resource R is then edited to change the ownership attribute to the organisation which sponsored creation at version N+1
4. Course C, continues to give credit to the creator of R because the course references version N of R
5. When C is edited and the version of R added to C is updated to N+1 (or further), only then will the course C give credit to the organisation which sponsored creation

Performance concerns

1. If the number of references grows large, there could be performance considerations when downloading the ECAR file
2. If #1 is indeed the case, i.e. there are performance implications in bundling attribution data with the content
   1. a content contributor API is created which provides complete details of contributors
   2. the web application and the mobile application will augment the content view with a link to a contributor view
   3. the contributor view will use the content contributor API to fetch the data needed
3. If #2 is not the case, i.e. if bundling the attribution data into the content ECAR does not significantly impact the ECAR size,
   1. the web application and mobile application will still augment the content view with a link to a contributor view
   2. however, the contributor view will use the data bundled in the ECAR to render the view

Copying content

1. When an item of content is copied, the new item of content must carry attribution to the original content
2. The attribution cannot be edited by the creator of the new content
3. If the content item is an aggregate content (course, collection, book), then the individual items which are part of the source are included into the derived content and credit to the creators of those items is handled as described in the section on Attribution of aggregate content above

Requirements

Questions

Below is a list of questions to be addressed as a result of this requirements document:

User interaction and design

Not Doing

• At this point, we are not considering the case of an individual creating content without belonging to any organisation. The case of user-rights outside an organisation which grants those rights is a cross-cutting concern across Sunbird and is not a valid scenario at present.