On Fri, 5 Mar 2010, Ralph Morelli wrote:
Mel and Greg,
Thanks for the suggestions. Of course, you're right about the "learning the tools" and
"learning the culture" distinction. I think we can probably do a
decent job of the former during the 3-day workshop but not the latter.
Especially since we are relative newbies at this and haven't really been fully
immersed ourselves. Trishan and I have had intermittent episodes of that kind
of immersion in our collaboration with Sahana. So I do appreciate this
point and have myself often been "productively lost" --- including when working
on the Sahana IRC. :)
One difference between our 3-day orientation and a POSSE is that for us this is
just the beginning of an 8-10 week, full-time collaboration. So we can
treat the workshop as just the starting point. One thing we plan to do this
summer -- that we haven't tried before -- is using an IRC channel to keep
the whole group together. This is the first summer we will not all be located
at Trinity. So it is necessary that we learn to use the IRC well.
" 'Setting up your own project' will be perilously large" -- Yes, that's
going to be tricky and in one case we don't really have any experience with
what that group will be doing. So it's not clear how we can be supportive.
(Greg: that project is based right in your neighborhood, so perhaps we can
get you engaged?)
Absolutely. As I said before, I stand ready to come to your workshop and
help however I can.
On the VCS issue, the different projects use different platforms --
e.g., POSIT (Google Code), Sahana (Sourceforge, Trac), OpenMRS (SVN),
etc. So the plan would be to provide a general introduction in the
plenary session plus a brief introduction to their specific repository
in the break out session. But, again, the 3-day meeting will just get
them started. They'll have all summer to gain experience--hopefully
with sufficient mentoring and support.
Regarding collaborators, we'll try to have some in-person collaborators
during the 3-day workshop. During the summer we'll use IRC, email and
other channels.
Awesome. I plan to add your IRC channel to my "lurk" list. :)
--g
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