Call Details

Call recording link: http://sra.sharedrecords.org/records/dc7a67fa9e6cdc079092e8ffb028459265708939.data
These notes also posted at: http://www.projects.unamesa.org/2008-11-05

Agenda

Academy update - Heather
CA Dept of Health update – Greg
Wikispaces update -Saq and Martin
EC2 migration – let Andreas or Greg know if you’re experiencing problems - all
Hesperian – update from Greg, feedback from all
UM technology infrastructure – feedback and suggestions
Update on TiddlyWiki core development with regards to jQuery – Martin (update via email)
Other updates from associates

Participants

  • Marianne
  • Greg
  • Eric
  • Saq
  • Paul
  • Heather
  • Martin
  • Barak

Apologies

  • Cory (traveling for next 3 weeks – through Nov. 19th)
  • Jonathan

UM Academy

Heather

  • I checked the AICRC wiki and there hasn’t been any feedback
    • I sent an email to Rebecca a week ago asking for feedback but haven’t received a response
    • I’ll be over there this afternoon so will ask in person
  • Eric has made some changes that the staff requested
  • (Paul) – we plan to get a short learning piece coming out of the AICRC pilot
    • Greg and I talked about not going forward with a longer engagement with AICRC but rather try to quickly get them something of value in the way of forms and document that process via video that we will then edit down for use by UM developers and stakeholders
    • we discussed engaging an intermediary – something like CARD in the East Bay that works on emergency response for community based organizations and non-profits that work with folks with disabilities. The goal being to provide quick training to somewhat technically savvy folks who can then help their own people fill forms. We can document that process of others building forms – move this business modeling work forward and also move forward on creating a forms library.
  • (Greg) – this academy has been a good learning experience and I appreciate all the effort that Heather and Eric have put into it. We now have a much better idea of what it will take to create an effective way for healthcare service organizations to gather info efficiently
    • Paul and I talked about what might be sustainable revenue sources and what kind of partnerships we should be looking for based on this learning

CA Dept of Health

Greg

  • I spent two days last week attending a workshop put together by the CA dept of health
  • their problem is gathering info from all the service providers in the state – specifically looking at HIV Aids prevention
    • they have 6 to 12 forms they use – some by the beneficiaries of the services and some by the providers
    • they also provide educational materials to the individuals
    • because of the privacy restriction, it’s very difficult to get a system that works well across the board
    • they also need to be able to id persons who receive help at different locations so their files can be ‘connected’
    • they need to make the process more efficient but also allow local customizations
    • they work with the general population but also with prison populations so type of info gathered in SF would be quite different from that gathered in a rural county
      • so they need a core set of forms and educational info that can be modified to suit local purposes
    • mostly the discussion last week was identifying the problems, the possible solutions, and where they might want to go in the future
      • I presented SRs and TW as part of the tools they might consider
      • they made no decisions
      • it might work to train an intermediary who understands the local workflow but maybe doesn’t understand the technology 100%
    • this ties well into the mobile data collection
      • workers in the field having something they could use through their mobile phone would be great – right now they have to lug around either tablet computers or special purpose pdas
      • also, in some of the health centers they don’t want to put a computer terminal in the waiting room due to privacy concerns and, also, concerns over the hard ware being stolen or damaged
    • it’s clear that they won’t be able to mandate a single solution and having a single form that can be used across platforms would be ideal
    • I’m hoping we’ll be able to keep in touch with what they’re doing and support that work
    • I have the contact info and all the slides that were presented from the individual providers as well as the pilot programs but I don’t know yet if those can be released
    • there’s one company based in Seattle that has developed an educational program – there’s a self assessment survey questionnaire that has to be filled out in order to receive services – they integrated this into an educational component – it is taken online and as they’re answering questions, they’re also getting bits of video, advice and answers to questions so it’s more engaging than simply writing answers on a piece of paper
      • also, there’s an audio version of the questions and answers
      • this engaging approach seems to be very effective
      • this may be a technique for us to use in the future for info gathering
      • contact info: Jim Larkin jim@ronline.com – Resources Online — combination learning tool and survey instrument
  • I also met a friend of Neal Lesh’s who’s been working in Malawi with Baobab Health
    • he’s working on an open source version of something similar to Frontline SMS that would allow aggregation on your computer from your handset
    • he’s interested in the work we’ve been doing so he might join some of our conference calls
    • contact info: Jeff Rafter jeff@baobabhealth.org – Baobab Health – friend of Neal Lesh working on mobile phone information gathering

EC2

Greg

  • the machines have been stable and all the problems have been resolved
  • (Martin) – sometimes get a few complaints about slowness but these are fewer than before

Hesperian

Greg

  • they had a technical advisors committee meeting on Monday night which I attended
    • it was a great opportunity to meet everyone who has been advising them, to get updates on the projects and to start some planning
    • we now have a timeline
    • in addition to the Gates funded project for Where There Is No Doctor they also just received a planning grant from Rockefeller for the Digital Library project
      • Digital Library for Hesperian means putting their digital works on the web, as opposed to new content that’s developed on the web
      • Where There Is No Doctor (WTIND) will be creating some new content whereas the Digital Library will take that content and make it accessible on the web
      • the Rockefeller grant is for field projects on how they want to present that info to Hesperian clients and partners and it’s based around a mediawiki implementation of WTIND and some other texts
      • Srini and his grad student, Matt, have added in a semantic component to the mediawiki so you can tag properties in the same way as you tag links – this allows you to look at all the symptoms for a particular disease or at a single symptom and it will tell you the diseases it’s associated with – so in some sense it’s a much better indexing system than you would have in a hardcopy book
        • they’re going to test this and then develop a plan for how they take their legacy materials and put them online
        • what we want to work toward is that the same technology infrastructure would also be used for the new materials
        • at the moment, our role is to stay in touch with the people doing the digital library work and maybe help them with the pilot and work on the architecture and getting support for it
        • this is in the plan that is due at the end of March
      • the other near-term planning component is that they’ll be doing a market research study for WTIND over the next two months- they’ll start doing the table of contents for the new version based on those results
        • the TOC will be a collaboration between Hesperian and 40 of their partners
        • this will be their first time using online tools and we’ll be supporting them in this first effort to do a digital version of the TOC that can have annotations and comments from the 40 partners
        • the planning stage will be over the course of the next 3 months – whether we use TW, mediwiki or some other combination will come out of the requirements both of Hesperian and the marketing survey
      • the mobile component is for the delivery of WTIND – they’ll be gathering info for that during the marketing survey but the TOC will be web based or email based rather than mobile
        • by mid 2009 we should have a plan in place to test the different types of potental user interfaces that would be used with the content – so a small scale pilot maybe by the end of 2009 or early 2010
  • just a reminder – the Hesperian project is a 3 year project and has a goal of developing at least 5 new chapters and making them available digitally and also through a mobile

Wikispaces

Saq

  • the only thing missing is the discussions implementation
    • Martin and I have decided that while this is important it’s not critical for any of the other projects
    • our target is to have it done by the end of the year so it will be ready for use with Andrew Lister’s class and, possible, with the Hesperian project
    • I’ll be working on the styling
    • Martin will work on the implementation
    • (Greg) – by the end of the year I’m hoping that we can review where media wiki is as well because that will come up with the Hesperian work
      • the old version of Where There Is No Doctor is in mediawiki – they haven’t made any decision yet whether mediawiki will be used for the deployment, but given the time that’s been put into it, I suspect that’s what they’ll want to do
      • the people who have been doing that work have been students at UC Berkeley so if we can have very specifically what we need to be done in addition to the media wiki apis, we might be able to get some of them to do that work – we’ll need a very clear statement of what needs to be done
  • I’ve been working with Andrew on setting up a public demo and we have the content for that ready – Andrew will do a write up as well as a screen catch – I’ll start work on service that will allow you to configure your own notebook
    • hopefully by the end of this month we’ll make that available to everyone

UM Technology Infrastructure

Saq

  • recently when we moved the TW infrastructure over to EC2, we ran into several problems
    • some measure were taken such as bringing in another system admin person which is a big help
  • looking back on it, realized that the biggest problem was communication and not having oversight on communication between people on our side and our customers
    • i.e. I didn’t know what bug reports had been filed with Andreas so when someone came to me asking about the status, I didn’t have any info so I then had to go locate from people in different places and time zones
    • I think it’s important to have a unified contact point within UM – whether an email address or mailing list or a google group
    • this isn’t just limited to hosting but also to the support we’ll be providing to partners like Hesperian, Meridien and the student notebook project
  • I have three ideas
    • set up an email address for each project which could get repetitive
    • use wildcards which gmail allows and what we’re using – i.e. support+tiddlywiki@unamesa.org which would automatically be sent to the support@unamesa.org address. We can then set up forwarding so the email could be sent to Martin, Andreas and myself
      • this way we’d have a history of all the incoming bug reports
      • the tricky part is that if someone replies to a message from their own email, then it’s outside the loop of unamesa.org
    • we could set up a support google group for UM services – this could become a problem if the volume of messages grows large
      • this way all correspondence will be easily seen and, also, public
      • (Greg) – it’s pretty hard to track in a google group in order to get a good overview, especially if you want to separate them out by different projects – there are some other services set up for support that do bug tracking and it’s based on email so we might look into those for a viable option
        • for now since we already have support@unamesa.org we could establish this as the first point of contact
        • (Eric) – using wikispaces like we have set up for the AICRC, we could set up a section such as it.unamesa.org as a wikispace and set up notifications for all the concerned parties
        • (Saq) – the only concern with that is the notifications need to be turned on by each concerned party
        • (Greg) – for now let’s use support@unmesa.org and start documenting things there – most importantly we could have one page set up for each of the projects so that it will serve as an FAQ for that project
        • (Saq) – I think a combination of that and a unified email address could work

TiddlyWiki Core Development

Martin (via email)

  • TiddlyWik jcore branch: This is the result of an idea by Phil Hawksworth, namely that we should try and include the jQuery library in TiddlyWiki so that its functionality is available to plugin writers. The compressed jQuery library is about 32K, so there was a plan to recover some of this by
    rewriting some of the core as thin wrappers around jQuery, thus saving code while maintaining compatibility. The experiment was to see if
    this was possible. We’ve now done enough work to believe that it is indeed possible – there will be an expansion is the size of the core,
    but we can probably limit this to about 15K. In return we’ll have a core with more functionality to plugin writers.

    Of course, maintaining compatibility with 2.4.1 is essential so we need to get plugin writers involved over an extended period to ensure
    that nothing is broken. Note the jcore release will probably be release 3.0, and its timing is not even planned yet. There will
    certainly be a 2.5 release before then, and there will probably be a 2.6 release before then as well.

  • (Saq) – there’s a TW developer’s call set up for this coming Monday at 10am PST

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 11/5 – 11/12

TW developer’s call on Mon., Nov. 10th – send out access and time of call info - Saq

Agenda for call on 11/12


Academy update - Heather
Unified support system for UM technology infrastructure update – Saq

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