going beyond "related projects"

[Point of procedure: I think starting discussions will work better than having many people edit the project page]

Presently, Geni lists "related projects", both those manually added as such and automatically (I think). While this can be of interest, it doesn't go nearly far enough.

1) We need the ability to nest projects. In this way we could say "Project X is a sub-project of Y". In this way we could arrange them categorically for easier management
a) This would replace many but NOT all of the current meta-projects that are mostly lists of projects.
b) We should be able to make a project a sub project of MULTIPLE projects.
c) I think we should consider NOT having sub-projects show up in project search results.

2) In ADDITION to nesting projects, we should have a way to tag them. This would improve search results.

YESS!!!!

Yes I agree, this would be especially important for location projects which I will be posting about in a minute

here, here.
I would like to add that when a profile is added to a project that it should be automatically indexed.... when setting up the project there should be a point at which you are asked how this project should be indexed. So much of my curator work at the moment is indexing and I'm quite sure this could be done at least rudimentally from the start.

Terry, can you explain what you mean by indexing? Please excuse my ignorance.

I totally agree, they should be indexed automatically, in fact I think that should be a top 10 suggestion.

pam, if you look at the O.B.E. project you'll see what I mean by indexing.

Terry, I see exactly what you mean, thank you.
Indexing would be really helpful. I find that searching through a long list of unsorted profiles to find a specific person is just a waste of time. As is trying to alphabetize existing project lists that never stay sorted.

Erica pointed me to a project by Randy Stebbing in which he can index alphabetically a project if you add it to his project but that is just basic indexing and wouldn't cover something like the OBE Project which is by status and alphabetical. Sometimes you'd want to Index Chronologically or even numerically.

Terry maybe he'd be able to develop more sorts if requested.

Randy Stebbing Is sure to be able to do this, however should it not be an integral part of Geni Projects instead of something a few of us are aware of and able to implement? If Randy can do it perhaps he should sell it to Geni! (not too expensive mind, we don't want Geni going down!

I just voted for the second idea for Related projects as I think they need to be a little more involved than just Main and sub project (we already have implemented that sort of) but it seems that when the suggestion one was made back in Feb I'd already voted for that! and and can't now remove my vote.

I suggest that when you make references to something outside this project, you post a link to it. Until mentioned I had no idea what the OBE project was. So here it is. Nice work Terry, but really crazy that this must be done manually.
http://www.geni.com/projects/Order-of-the-British-Empire-O-B-E/10136

The South Africans use a standard ending to all of our projects in order to facilitate this sub project nesting (vertical categorising) and linked project cross referencing (horizontal categorizing) :

ie:

JUMP BACK TO:
*Hypertext link to our 'Welkom Cuzzins' Geni SA Projects' Main Site Index & Help Page'
*Hypertext link to other projects this one might pertain to / fall under as a sub-project eg International War & Military Projects

SEE ALSO RELATED GENI PROJECT PAGES:
*Hypertext link to 'WWI Wall of Honour' project
*

eg:http://www.geni.com/projects/South-Africans-in-WORLD-WAR-I/12369

http://www.geni.com/projects/South-Africans-in-WORLD-WAR-I/12369

Sorry for not including links (It's a weakness of mine I'm trying to overcome)

A lot of these ideas are part of our plan to overhaul projects. We managed to do the first phase of the plan before some other things took over as priorities. I am trying to sneak in some small project related releases in the next few weeks. One will be displaying the tags associated with a project and allowing you to click on the tag to see all projects with that tag.

(Please pardon my writing length!) There is a 'best practices" issue I've been considering. I have been extensively editing some existing umbrella projects and also creating a few new projects, and realized that I didn't have a good idea of how the Related Projects field is intended to be used, or how it might best be used. Added to the mix is how to best combine Related Projects with Tags.

The root of the confusion is whether the best practice would be to (1) use a project's Related Projects field to only point toward higher hierarchy projects, (2) use the field to point only toward lower hierarchy projects, (3) use field to point only toward related by out-of-hierarchy projects, (4) some combination of those three. I feel that Tags are a better way to implement (3) in general when the relationship is loose, which leaves up vs. down hierarchy pointing.

It's in umbrella projects that using Related Projects for pointing down hierarchy is an obvious problem, because the list becomes so long that hardly any of it is displayed on the page (yes, you can display more if you notice the link to do so). So for an umbrella project, the more useful way to point to lower hierarchy projects is within the body of the project overview page, where you can use an outline format that's more informative than the Related Projects simple list.

So I conclude that the best practice for use of the Related Projects field is primarily for pointing to higher hierarchy projects, plus perhaps a small number of out-of-hierarchy but especially relevant related projects. Does this make sense (or not) for anyone else? Am I missing anything?

Examples I've been working with:
Jews of Belarus. https://www.geni.com/projects/Jews-of-Belarus/18585
Jewish Communities in Romania. https://www.geni.com/projects/Jewish-Communities-in-Romania/18148
Jewish Families of Turov and Zhitkovichi, Belarus. https://www.geni.com/projects/Jewish-Families-of-Turov-and-Zhitkovi...
Granadier Families of Belarus. https://www.geni.com/projects/Granadier-Families-of-Belarus/37781

Eric H Mercer I love the way your umbrella project for Jews of Belarus is organized. I immediately went to the Minsk district looking for Pinsk (I have an ancestor from there), very easy to find (although we need a Jewish Community of Pinsk page, if you see fit!).

"Related" projects are the "core" navigation tool built into Geni, there is no hierarchy. Its a blunt tool really, and the indexing & categorizing nuances you can do on an umbrella page is a good way to be more precise.

Tags, for me, are "extra" project attributes. For instance, add the tag 1942. All events in Geni projects with the same tag will show in search. The idea is a tag is a "cloud" of associated topics, useful for a geography, a timeline, an affiliation in novel and non hierearchical ways.

Please keep up the innovation and great work.

Great description of a "good practice", Eric.

In one set of "family" projects (Neely clan), I found that I "related" the projects of (mostly) the 'higher' project(s) ... by careful naming, there is sort of a hierarchy implied in the listing of Related projects -- which comes from realizing that the Related list is alphabetical. For that family name set of projects, I chose to use a key date (e.g. birth year) as a "sorting" point in the names.

A 'lower level' project typically only has two "Related" links: the immediate predecessor, and the top-level Master overview project.

If at the time you read this there are still examples in the "Master" project, one can see the other convention I adopted, which is to reference *Project* links in bold, and individual profile links not bolded. I used individual profiles as 'placeholders' in the hierarchy until the corresponding project is created. (That master project starting point, if interested, is https://www.geni.com/projects/Neely-Clan-Master-Project-Overview/13186).

Oh, one other thing I recall (now, looking back) that I did:

The name / text I use as the *link* in the body of the project description's hierarchy may not be exactly the same as the actual sub-project name.

That allows the "flow" of the overview to be more descriptive (and usually more accurate as to the content) without being constrained by wanting the actual projects names to "sort nicely" when alphabetized.

Thus, the Master project may display the link-text as "Six generations of Neelys in the United States", but the corresponding actual project name (as also shows on the Related list) is "Neely Family - 1728 to 1896, starting with Thomas Neely, Sr."

re: project names in bold ... I see, Eric, that you use a similar convention in the overviews: Project links in bold, other kinds of links not-bold. Seems like another "useful convention" <smile>.

I made a feature request (easier to edit there on the new help platform). It doesn't address all the needs for subproject structure. Basically I'm calling for having tags for the profiles in a particular project (not to be confused with the project tags).

https://help.geni.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115001149287-Project...

I believe Terry Jackson (Switzer) in particular would like it, judging from her comments back in 2012.

Commented. Favicons, that is cool.

re: feature requests ... be sure to click the "up-arrow" to the left of the "title" of the proposal if you like it! ... that's how record your "vote".

Terry Jackson (Switzer) and Erica Howton. I stopped offering to create sorted indexes for projects about when geni added the ability to export a .csv file for a project. However a couple of enhancements are needed to actually make the exported .csv files useful to users.

Mike Stangel. Can we get an additional "url category" added as an option for the "Columns" on the list of a project's profiles? Also can we decouple the "Name/About" grouping into 2 separate fields? Right now if you display the "name" you get the "about text" in the same field. This totally messes up the exported csv and your ability to actually use it in Excel.

Ideally a first name and separate last name field is also needed.

To see the problems of the current implementation pick a project and scroll down to the bottom of the first page of profiles and click on the "Export as CSV.." link. Then open up your email that geni will send you to download your .csv file.

Import the .csv file into Excel as a delimited file and experiment with the different kinds of delimiters as you do your import into Excel. Unfortunately I have not found an combination of settings that will give you a good spreadsheet without having to do major manual work on the data.