Thanks for the advice everyone, I think I have plenty to do from the sounds of it.
I presented to (most of) the engineers yesterday and although I didn't get any volunteers or hatemail I did get plenty of general moral support and, "yes that's a great idea" (with the assumed rider "as long as I don't have to do anything"). Though the people are all in one geographical location (two buildings, but essentially "down the corridor"), their projects are really quite separate. However, I'm hoping that an outcome of this exercise will be more collaboration. I'll work on the wiki side of things, and I especially like the idea of putting stuff on the wiki and dragging people to it by sending them links. I'll try to keep it thin too. I was suggesting that we allow a 140 character description of everyone's projects but someone suggested that to really do them justice they should be permitted half a dozen pages of detail - I suggested that perhaps the 140 characters could be followed by a link to such detail if people want it and if it's been written (which, for many projects, it probably hasn't). (Oh, no chance of SharePoint either - we've already got that and I really don't want to use it!) Just on that, we already have a presentation series in the department for talking about a lot of these tools, but it's from the domain/ research perspective - e.g. "This is why this tool is good, and what science and research it's based on." But none of the technical engineering detail of the projects is covered. To be fair, it's not relevant to most of the people around here, just the engineers. With the Brown Bag lunches I've got Rich Hickey's 'Hammock-driven development' lined up first, but I think I'll go on to do a couple of lightning talks of my own (covering how my project uses OSGi, and gradle, and unit testing and stuff) followed by time for discussion, so that ought to be a gentle introduction. Short definitely == good. I've already received half a dozen acceptances to the meeting request too, so that's encouraging. Management paying for pizza might be a step too far though, as we're government. :o) I really like the idea of rotating people through projects and maybe getting bigger teams together, but I can see immediate difficulties with management - we're very hierarchical. I'll explore it though and see if there's anything I can push up the chain. I'll do my best to follow people up too, to see if what I'm putting out there is, if nothing else, interesting. I've got management buy-in now, so I can't back down. ;o) Thanks again, for all the suggestions and help. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
