Call Details
Call recording link:
http://sra.sharedrecords.org:8080/SRCDataStore/RESTServlet/0b08a296df9e8d110398aec9962fe05348cf514f.data
These notes also posted at:
http://www.projects.unamesa.org/2008-10-01 &
http://blog.unamesa.org/
Agenda
Academy update - Heather
Hesperian update - Greg
Wikispaces update - Saq and Martin
EC2 update - Saq
MORE project - Saq
Other updates from associates
Participants
- Greg
- Saq
- Heather
- Marianne
- Paul
- Martin
- Eric
- Jon
- Cory
Apologies
UM Academy
Heather
- last week posted to a few different email lists and so far have received 3 responses
- Scott from CARD ( Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disasters) - an emergency preparedness and training organization
- he's pretty savvy about the tools
- working on 'wisdom repository' which seems particularly suited
- thinking of building it on a wiki base
- participants record or post in some manner, their experience with a specific disaster process - observations, anecdotes, solutions - in order t build up a database library
- they need a super easy user interface, searchable, ability to embed video
- they want some content control
- he spoke of filemaker pro as a model for administrater control over content
- we discussed features of TW
- he'd like user accounts to include preferences
- they'd like to have this done within the year and can start as early as October
- he and CARD may make a better partner than participant in the Academy
- (Greg) - since they're talking about developing an entirely new process, I agree that we can speak with them about helping to develop it and helping to provide the infrastructure and I agree that they're not a good candidate for the Academy - you can have him call me directly
- Jennifer - organization unknown
- Sara from Woman's Cancer Research Center
- she has a straightforward forms project but they're doing a fund raiser right now so she won't be able to discuss it until the first week of October
- American Indian Child Resource Center is still interested
- I need to talk to Mary but wanted to run this by you first
- the AICRC consists of 4 different departments - some of which use the same info and some info needs to seen only by the appropriate dept (and NOT shared)
- mental health dept
- Indian education dept
- Foster care dept
- Youth Services dept
- there is a paper process that could be moved to digital
- she might be able to get a higher level person involved who understands what does and doesn't overlap, as well as someone from the education department
- they could be an option for the Oct. Academy, perhps along with working with someone from the schools
- (Greg) - my hope is that we'll have representation from multiple locations, so committment from at least one other organization would be good before we get completely involved
- Curriculum
- Paul and I have been talking about shrinking it at least for the pilot program, to a one or two day model
- a one day, 8 hour training with another one day, 8 hr training 3 weeks to a month later
- this would move a lot of the needs assessment & evaluation to pre-training
- they would do this on their own time & submit it before the training day
- the advantage to this would be that the trainer would have more info before the class and the technical people would know ahead of time what the needs might be
- we would still do the log and process documentation
- I could possibly call and do an interview ahead of time to document the processes
- (Eric) - perhaps we can develop another form for Academy #2 based on the questions you find are most valuable so they can document the processes themselves without an interview
- (Greg) - I agree that having a document upfront to document their existing processes, that might even include video or links to videos and their existing forms would be good - and that we'll need to do this upfront if we shrink the curriculum
- I suspect it would better to gather this info in person rather than on the phone so that you can get copies of the forms they're using see the processes in context
- this would also allow you to take videos
- in the future, if this interview process is documented well enough, we might be able to have semi-volunteers handle this step and help to get organizations thinking about rreworking their paper processes
- (Paul) - if we go with the truncated model, in addition to having a good input process, I think we'll also need a stronger output process, in other words, having tech support so that they will be able to implement the processes they learn (since they won't have 40 hours in the Academy)
- (Heather) - Greg previously suggested that each participant have a myspace page where they can put their comments/concerns
- that page would then be reviewed by Marianne or their individual tech support person who can then reply on the same page
- (Greg) - right, and we might follow up with them once a week for a month in addition to monitoring the space - I agree that they'll need additional support since they won't have several days in the Academy to get accustomed to it.
- Budget
- it's sufficient for the shortened curriculum but we should probably update it for the longterm at some point
- (Greg) - I'd like to review the original plan, possibly revise it and have that finalized before the end of the month
- academy schedule
- (Heather) - I agree. We need to balance, though, having a good training schedule with the time the partiipants have to give to it
- ideally, I think the 5 day training schedule is best - the two day, back to back schedule is good too
- I'll offer that as one of the options when I talk with people and see what ends up being best for them
- application
- (Eric) - there's currently a technical glitch we can kind of work around for the short term and an overall review of the material is needed
- (Heather) - let's schedule a call for Friday @ 10am PDT and we'll call this number
- (Eric) - the forms and application are working - there's a FAQs section - you can fill in the application form and verify it's contents and hit 'send'
- while the script was set up by Andreas for sending the application through the unamesa.org website, it isn't actually dipatching the email so it needs to be debugged
- for now, they're being sent through the tiddlytools server
- (Greg) - for the moment, it would work to have them saved to a file on the server
- (Eric) - then someone needs to go in to check for applications now and then
- perhaps each application gets logged to a separate file in a directory
- I'll take care of setting that up
Hesperian
Greg
- I met with Srini and Matt who have been working on the media wiki versions of the some of the Hesperian books
- they have some really interesting technology for not just converting the material but also putting an ontology on top of it so that you can support different translations and support searches that are based on things like symptoms
- this is much more than I expected - Srini is an expert in semanticweb and ontologies and he sees a real opportunity for the research results to play an important role in improving healthcare worldwide
- still need to get TW support for the mediawiki format
- once we're stable with the current wikispaces stuff and Martin has time, I'd like to hook Martin up directly with Srini and the work that they're doing so we can make sure that the technology path is appropriate, whether that's using the mediawiki adaptor for TW or some other approach
- the plugins they have for mediawiki - I suspect that won't work in TW since it's php - so when you're offline, the functionality you'll have available to you will just be the base searching capabilities of TW and then when you're online you'd have some additional capabilities and we're going to have to decide on how to present that to users
- we don't have a specific start date for the Hesperian project yet - hopefully it will be in October
Wikispaces
Saq
- had a brief talk with Adam
- they're prioritizing their educational program right now so I'm not sure how quick the turn around on our requests will be
- our current technology with our adaptor is not the greatest but it does do what you want it to do so even if they don't meet our requests soon that's okay
- I've completed refactoring the code base so we now have a common code that we can build upon
- later this week I'll borrow some content from Andrew and actually set up a test space which will mimic the way Andrew is using it so that other educators can look at it
- the next piece of the puzzle will be to set up a service where you can go and enter your details as to the name of your space and the url an it'll produce a notebook for your students and yourself to use
- message handling
- (Martin) - another person at Osmosoft is also doing some work on threading discussions in TW so I'm trying to coordinate with him so we don't end up with two variants
- currently the discussions can be displayed but not replied to
- (Saq) - one of your plugins that I modified quite a bit but ended up not using for th work with Andrew is the import workspace plugin - it has some issues where it assigns values to the custom default fields which is problematic if you're dealing with multiple servers - I'll send the patch to you as it might be useful
- I've been providing support to Andrew and his students - there hasn't been anything too worrisome
- we're documenting everything on the wikispaces space - after the end of the course, we'll go over our intial help documentation and the presentation Andrew did for introducing it and see how we can improve it
- Andrew also did a short video that introduces the notebook so I'll send that around to everyone
- here's a link to the notebook - http://pols250-2008.projects. unamesa.org/space/showimage/ POLS250-StudentNotebook.html
- please take a look and give feedback
- a lot of the students have been using the online wiki - whether or not they're using the personal notebook is hard to gauge right now
- in 3 weeks Andrew is going to do a survey discuss it with the students and get feedback
- it's a class of almost 300 students so if we can get 40 or 50 who are using it, it will be a good test case to help us develop this further
EC2
Saq
- the tiddlywiki.org server is going to be moved to the EC2 hosting service this weekend
- Andreas will make the move Friday morning and we're expecting a down time from 24 to 72 hours while the DNS propagates
- Andreas will do some redirection with the old servers to try to shorten the down time as much as possible and the community has been notified
- I'll send out a reminder on Thursday night
- (Greg) - the UM homepage is now being served frm EC2 as well
- the only issue is that the subversion repository for the static homepage looks like it's not configured properly
- I'll figure out how to update that
MORE
Saq
- I worked with Yousef this week to put together a document that explains and introduces the VIC concept and the ongoing broadcasts for Bangladesh Open Univ. and outlines what needs to be done to scale this project further
- the original document that Yousef put together assumed a prior knowledge of what the techniques were about but since we're going to use it for fundraising, that wouldn't be appropriate, so I sent him an outline of topics to be covered
- with language issues, it won't be in the shape I'd like for it to be so I'll spend the weekend rewriting and revising to an extent
- by Monday we should have a document we can use to introduce people to the content of the VIC and also for fundraising purposes
Forms Work
Saq
- I've been having conversations with Chris Dent
- he has documented those thoughts as discussion items on the wiki and added ideas of how the tiddlyweb code could map onto the service they want to provide
- Chris isn't familiar with SRs and such so I'll be having another conversation with him to explain
- I think we're headed in the right direction in terms of trying to identify exactly how a service that stores forms would look like
- Greg - do we have the resources to start development?
- (Greg) - it depends on exactly what resources are needed - we do have some money to support that
- (Saq) - a lot of the work is client side - not sure how much work we'd need Chris to do for us
- (Greg) - my hope is to make the server side as simple as possible so it's not a burden to maintain or adopt
- (Saq) - I agree - also the code seems to be quite modular so we should be able to add as we go
Additional Items
Greg
- Paul sent around info about the Intel Challenge - a $100,000 prize for ideas on using technology to improve education, healthcare, the environment and/or global poverty
- the registration to submit an entry is due on Sept. 30th and the actual entry is due in a few months
- it looks like it would be a worthwhile exercise for us to do - I think that the MORE project making a significant change in education has a chance at this
- UM has a vehicle for bringing others together and I'd like to see that happen if we can invite others who have similar ideas for distance learning to make this entry effective, that would be helpful
- in addition to Bangladesh Open Univ. we might try to reactivate other contacts
- (Cory) - google just also published a contest for $10 million for "ideas that help people" - perhaps we should consider this for the MORE project, too
- (Greg) - great - maybe Marianne could be the repository for these contests and help us figure out which ones we should spend some effort on
- (Marianne) - that'd be great - also, I tried to contact Intel regarding the registration form that they indicate is online however can't be found - there was no one I could speak with by phone so I sent an email and we're in wait mode on that
Jon
- there are two cotacts I'd like to introduce the group to
- a researcher at UCSF - Fraya
- she wrote a tablet based solution for creating mobile health entrepreneurs to disseminate knowledge an interventions using a tablet for illiterate patients
- I wanted to connect you to her to see if there are opportunities for collaboration
- there's also a group that's been working on text messaging for literacy - they have data they're about to publish
Greg
- I spoke with Tapan Parikh at Berkeley last week regarding the OpenRosa project
- he's interested in pursuing that and he also agreed that having the TW preview for the X forms would be a significant step in making it possible to have a single form association that works across mobile phones, the web and paper
- one of his former students, Yaol Schwartzman, is doing mobile phone data collection and inspection for Fair Trade and it's called Digital ICS - you can see a demo at digitalics.org.
- this came out of some work that UM supported a few years ago
- (Jon) - his students are working mostly in Python which doesn't play well with the Java stuff the rest of the group has been doing
- Univ. of Washington has a relationship with Google now to build a data collection tool that they're going to do X forms on android - so that's yet another group
- there's still no one in the community pushing on the standardization of the header format
- (Greg) - let's try to make that work and the very specific thing is getting enough info so that Martin could take a crack at doing a viewer for an X form in TW
- (Jon) - right now the OpenRosa consortium is trying to get money from IDRC which they will likely get but I don't know the timeframe
- there's no timeline in the community for the standardization piece - I think this is on hold until OpenRosa gets its core funding again
- when it does go forward, I think we'll be writing it because we're the only ones who have done the backend and the front end
SharedRecords
Greg
- one small change we'd talked about - simply being able to add meta data for a record that is not necessarily stored on the server - this is small change and necessary for one of the pilot projects that we're doing
- Jon & Cory - if you have a chance to point out to Andreas what needs to be changed in the code or if it's already been updated - then he can do a new build of the virtual machine
- (Jon) - I'd thought we'd already done that but I'll check
- (Greg) - I thought it'd already been done, too - I think it might be a matter of getting documentation to the developer who is having trouble
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.
UM Calendars
Action Items for 9/24 - 10/01
Academy application call, Fri., Sept. 26 @ 10am PDT, on the conference call line. - all who have been helping with the application and can make it
Wikispaces: send plugin patch to Martin - Saq
Wikispaces: Andrew's video, send to everyone - Saq
Wikispaces: student notebook, take a look at **http://pols250-2008.projects. unamesa.org/space/showimage/ POLS250-StudentNotebook.html** & give feedback - All
Two new contacts from Jon - email info to all - Jon
Agenda for call on 10/01
Academy update - Heather
2008-09-24Protected
