UnaMesa » 2008-04-16

Call Details

Call recording link: http://sra.sharedrecords.org:8080/SRCDataStore/RESTServlet/266221d521aec4ce7c9ab8b7062646cdafe27dad.data

These notes also posted at: http://blog.unamesa.org/

Agenda

UM Academy

Wikispaces backups

Andreas

Amazon and SR

Andreas

Wikispaces project

Saq - brief overview, formatting helper
Eric - permissions sniffer, discussions
Martin - import and sync

MORE

Saq - brief update

UnaMesa website design

Barak and Saq: progress report
Saq: deployment plans

Business cards:

progress update from Marianne and Saq

Other updates from associates

Participants

Andreas
Eric
Marianne
Barak
Greg
Saq
Martin

UnaMesa Academy

Greg

have some feedback after speaking with a few people
- overall the idea is resonating with people
- Paul Lamb, who started StreetTech and is an advisor to UM
  - StreetTech works with adult populations that don't have marketable skills and might have been incarcerated - they're taught to become system administrators
  - Paul Lamb thinks the UM Academy model is definitely worth trying and might close the gap between what technology can do and what it's currently doing in service organizations
  - I asked him for recommendations of people in the Bay Area with whom we could set up a pilot project for this summer
  - he'll get back to me by Friday
I would like some feedback on your opinions of how the UM Academy might work, particularly in the TW community and how you see yourselves as contributing (faciliators? support personnel?)
(Eric) - a lot of the learning that takes place in the TW community occurs online but it's not well structured
- the TWIG (TW Interest Group) is similar to this concept - where local people get together on a regular schedule and share what they're doing
  - routinely there's a guest speaker or a technical presentation on a specific topic
- the UM Academy will be more structured but perhaps building on the TWIG freeform concept might be a good place to start
- I"m extremely interested in being a facilitor for UM Academy to teach people how to use TW
(Greg) - groups like TWIG tend to be technology oriented and what I'm imagining for UMA is that they'd be more practice oriented
- i.e. groups of educators who are educators first and users of technology second
- perhaps there can be an overlap between this and a group like TWIG
(Barak) - the idea seems like it will be very valuable and a way to tie a lot of UM together and make it clear what UM does
- I think of it like a startup - the most imp constituents are those who would use it, the "customers"
- makes sense to understand very clearly who they are and what the first "product" or "service" for them
- and what will UM offer them - info, connections, free tools?
- come up with a product plan and road map first - the first thing offered has to be a whole product that people can benefit from immediately
- who would be needed to serve the end users?
- finally have a launch plan - who will the first students be? how will we find them?
(Greg) - I agree that we need to focus on these things
(Eric) - the most obvious first segment is educators who tend to implement this technology
- my sister is a prof in VA who does some online education - they have courses to teach the educators about using new tools
- educators are receptive to exploring new technology
(Andreas) - especially if "free" is involved - educators are also eager to use the new technology
(Greg) - I wonder if what we're learning in Bangladesh Virtual Classroom project woudl be a topic for discussing with educators
- what we've been talking about lately is where people can have a laptop set up that they can have their cell phone connected, students or parents can send SMS to them and thus make for a closer connection between parents/students and teachers
(Saq) - it's important that this be presented as being offered by a non profit organization and free of cost
- when it comes to having a complete product to offer, that's a good point but I don't think we'll come up with a product or course on our own
  - the first sessions we run are going to have to be educators we can convince of the value of the UM Academy and have them come work with us on developing that (it will have to be subsidized at first)
  - I'm trying to get connected with eduwiki.us people- group of eductors mostly in PA who put together a wiki and talk about how to better use technology
    - they will be at the NECC conference
    - I'm going to set up a call with them this week - their experience would be invaluable
(Greg) - would it be useful to start with the simplest thing we know already provides value -i.e. creating videos of educators discussing how to use a particular technology for their educational projects and making that available online
- what I'm imagining is taking what we've learned from the Virtual Classroom project and using that to create a minicourse re: how you use wikis for a school project...then having that video as part of UMA...this could be a "first product"
(Saq) - educators are already involved in similar things and technology - this is not a new thing we're offering but a unique perspective
- instead of telling them that we can do what they're already doing, the way I'm trying to present it to them is that we can serve as an organization that is nonprofit and has their best interests at heart as well as the best interest of good education at heart and trying to collate all that info
  - instead of each of them having to put up their own wikis and doing the maintenance work, the UMA can be the place where all of that is collated, stored and presented in an organized manner - so they can focus on the actual content and actually using the content
(Greg) - we're pretty much in agreement on that
- what we're doing is making it easier for them to connect with the audience and the larger context

Saq

I'm hoping to make contact with the two teachers who will be representing the eduwiki group at the NECC Conference
- they've both been nominated for International Teacher & Leader of the Year
- hoping that can be a networking opportunity for me (i.e. they can introduce me to others at the conference)

Greg

Adam from Wikispaces will be at the NetSquared conference ( a production of Tech Soup) in the Bay Area in late May
- I might join him in a panel discussion
- he's also looking for another nonprofit so it might be a good chance to bring in one of those teachers as part of that discussion

Andreas

a lot of what you're talking about with UMA idea is of interest in the type of school setting where I teach - the parents and teachers want more education regarding technology (i.e. parents want to know what their kids know re: things such as My Space and, also, want to be kept up to date on what's happening in the classroom - teachers want to know more about bringing technology into the classroom)

Wikispaces Backups

Andreas

need to post to the SocialText site the info about what I'm backing up and where it's available
SRs virtual images have been updated - posted an update that's both a VMware image and an Amazon Easy2 image
- tech discussion minutes 23 - 24
there's an EC2 image running now of the SRs server that's storing locally onto the image, so no images get saved
- will leave that up for the next week and then will switch test@sharedrecords.org
- running on EC2 is nice - easy to manage
- the largest files I've done are 100k and 1 a couple megabytes
(Greg) - let's set a limit of an hour long video as a test - above that size we won't make any guarantees
(Andreas) - then I'll switch the storage to F3 so as not to run out of room - I'll leave it running with an obscure IP address for now

Wikispaces

(minutes 27 to 40)
Saq

wrote a formatting helper and incorporated it into the prototype
- it automatically detects if the page is using wikispaces format or tw format
- can do tables as well
- going to add in support for being able to select text and turn it into a link
- what's really nice is that, you have a plain tiddler in a TW called, for ex., wkispaces markup rules, and using slices, everything's been defined
  - it's very easy to add support for different markup types, if you want to have it working with socialtext, for example

Discussions
Eric

I've taken some of the earlier work done on Tiddly tools for adding comments to a tiddler
- converted them from inline scripts to true plugins so they have no dependency
- basically a pair of plugins, one called the comment plugin (creates individual comments) and the other discussion plugin (creates a summary list using sliders to display individual comments as well as providing comment form for adding comments to discussion)
- easy to take any tiddler and start discussing it

(Saq) - Eric has posted a demo on the mixins site on a page called discussion plug in

http://mixins.projects.unamesa .org/DiscussionsPlugin

there are some discussion items there - please give feedback

once the discussion feature is finalized, all we're missing is the import and sync work for making it work properly with the Soap adaptor - then we can go ahead with user testing

Permissions Sniffing
Eric

unfortunately, in order to sniff the permissions, you have to ask for permissions to see if they're available and the browser gives you the ugly interface

I can make a document that will sniff for permissions and then throw you over to the per file permission interface that Javier built, but as soon as you load it locally, you get the ugly request for permissions, which you can deny but you can't tell it ahead of time

it's basically an issue of the user experience trying to avoid the pop up box before getting an explanation as to why they're being asked for it

(Saq) - and the pop up box gives you the option to remember that so you could end up giving permissions for all local files

(Eric) - if you accept that box and remember the permissions, I can still shunt you over after that to the per file permissions that Javier built which then explains why that was a bad decision and allow you to reverse it

it's not quite the right experience for the user - they shouldn't be confronted with the security issue unless they really need it and even then it should be presented in a less obtuse way

MORE
Saq

been helping them out with testing

would like to have 100% code coverage in two weeks

haven't been able to reach Yousuf since last week

if all is going according to plan, the first lesson will air on the 19th

I converted the videos and will upload those and then will get the work documentation organized

UnaMesa Website Design
Saq

going to make a few small tweaks

I'll then put it in subversion as our 'base design', then we can have a discussion on the content

I'll also take the base design, get rid of some of the boxes and come up with an mthtml template that we can use for other pages we might want to create to have a similar look and feel

one of the current limitations we have is that you have to be comfortable with html in order to make changes

I"m considering working with Jonathan Lister at Osmosoft who has worked on tiddly templating, which is working with different templates in TW

I want for each of the menus and the boxes in the design to be a different tiddler and to be able to use TW as a publishing mechanism for the website, so the next time we need to change the content it's as simple as opening a TW, editing a tiddler, and pressing save

that also means we could write in TW syntax and it would get rendered as HTML

The following notes are from an email update after the call.

I've gone over the work by Barak's team and let them know that we can consider it to be complete.

I've fixed the few IE6 CSS bugs and corrected a coloring issue in the header

The html file with accompanying css and image files, and the source image file for the header, have been submitted to subversion at http://svn.unamesa.org/trunk /unamesa-website-design

I've documented the work on the website design at http://umwebsite.projects .unamesa.org/
Both what has been done and what remains

We need to go over the content for the website and make any changes necessary before the site goes live. To that end I have to set up a wiki page with the current content so we can all collaborate on this. Please take a look and provide feedback: http://umwebsite.projects .unamesa.org/Content

I am exploring using TiddlyWiki as a publishing tool to facilitate editing and updating the page. Jon Lister of Osmosoft is helping with this work and we have made considerable progress and should be finished early next week. Details have been documented here: http://umwebsite.projects .unamesa.org/Updating+and +managing

The current workflow for updating the website involves having to make changes to a local copy and uploading it. I'd like to avoid this and be able to do all edits online. To this end, I would like to know what hosting we are using for www.unamesa.org. Is it S3? I know that currently the svn post-commit publishes the html file www.unamesa.org, would it be possible to do the same thing using a POST or PUT? Given details regarding where we are doing the hosting I can probably figure the rest out myself.

Business Cards
Marianne

we were sent several design samples from the designer and decided on one

the front of each card will have the UM logo, address and website address directly beneath it

on the right side of the front will be the associate's name, title, city and country or state and country, email address and phone #

still discussing the customization of the back of each card

will be customized to the associate, with a tagline and info specific to his focus in UM

or just a general description of what UM does

a set of general cards will be made up for those who don't need individualized cards but would like to be able to hand out info about UM

(Saq) - we're having my card designed, then I'll use that as a template to create the others

(Greg) - the individual associates can decide what to have put on the back of their cards

it would be good to document this on one of the project pages so when we need the next person's cards,they can see what the options are for the back of the card

UM Quarterly Newsletter

Online version:http://www.projects.unamesa.org/Newsletter - March 2008

it was sent out early this week to the "friends of UM" list

associates are encouraged to send it out to people they know and start developing relationships

UnaMesa WikiSpaces Sites
The list of all sites can be found at http://www.projects.unamesa.org/Wikis
Please add any pages/spaces that are missing from this list or let me know what they are and I'll add them.

Action Items for 4/16 - 4/23

We need to go over the content for the website and make any changes necessary before the site goes live. To that end I have to set up a wiki page with the current content so we can all collaborate on this. Please take a look and provide feedback: http://umwebsite.projects .unamesa.org/Content

Agenda for call on 4/23

UM Academy
Greg

update re: Paul Lamb recommendation for UM pilot

SharedRecords
Andreas**