Seed was my 4th year Honours project for my undergraduate degree, and is a seminar content management web application. The word seminar derives from the latin seminarium meaning seed plot, which is where Seed got it's name. The word seminar in this context is a series of periodic academic lectures for particular research groups, and not one off conferences. It is assumed the seminar organiser will not need to register attendance, sell tickets or need large scale advertising for the seminars.

The idea is that each department has version of Seed which hosts all the research / seminar groups in one place. This means seminar information can be shared between groups, easily accessed, and seminar organisers can avoid clashes by viewing all current departmental seminars. Each group gets their own mini website which is totally customizable in terms of layout. A lot of university departments give their research groups their own webspace which are hard to find and do not link to each other. These are also usually static HTML pages which the seminar organiser has to manually edit. The organiser also has to arrange the seminar timetable and send out reminder emails: both time consuming and repetative tasks.

Seed makes their lives easier with customizable, automatic reminder emails (to the speaker and/or mailing lists) and visual scheduling aids with just one click needed to turn a date & time request from a potential speaker into a seminar. Seed also provides RSS and iCal feeds, periodical archiving of old seminars, the ability to upload slides, management of administrative users with roles and permissions, email templates for invitations, annoucements, reminders, room bookings and cancellations (and the ability to add your own templates), static pages with full HTML access via WYSIWYG editors and website logs.

Particular attention to the usability of the web application was given by doing user testing, and following design principles, guidelines and design patterns. The installation comes with 3 default CSS themes based on web usability and human-computer interaction research. However the mini websites can also choose to upload their own CSS and thereby making the site fit in completely with any existing departmental websites.

You can see an example of Seed in use at the Informatics department of Edinburgh University. If you would like to use Seed, send me a message and I'll give you the Python package. You'll need a webserver, Python 2.4 or higher and an SQL database of some sort.

Note: As of September 2009 I am no longer working on Seed, but if any major bugs are found I will endeavour to fix them. Full documentation on how to set Seed up and how to use it from a seminar organisers point of view comes with the package.