First, here’s the old approach where I start by describing the big picture.

Usually I start by pointing out that society faces tremendous challenges in providing education, healthcare, and social service in our current political economy. Most people understand and agree.  Some even go on to express their unease about living in a society that generously rewards bankers and athletes but pays teachers poorly.  Most people also “get” the difference between technology and service when I give the example of cell phones changing every year, but going to see a doctor or sitting in a classroom not changing much in 50 years.  They see the improvements brought about in their personal lives by technology, however, going to a doctor seems to become ever more painful.

So far, so good.

People generally understand the problems we’re trying to solve and even understand that you can’t “pay” someone to truly care about serving their students, patients, or clients.  Then I say something like “we’re moving from an industrial economy to a service economy.”

At this point, most people nod but you can see their eyes glazing over a bit.

Then I might point out that the current mechanisms for market based pricing don’t actually work for intangibles because there’s an infinite supply of anything digital (information, music, software).  [Three problematic concepts -- "market pricing", "intangibles", "infinite" ] Not only that, but the value of a service, such as education and healthcare depends on both the intangible information and the quality of the interaction between the provider and the client.  [People may like or dislike their teachers, but they don't explicitly think about quality of interaction or really think through the notion that a student must play an active role in the process. You can't pour knowledge into a student's head the way you pour oil into an engine.]  But since the value of an interaction is not visible in the form of cash or other rewards, there’s very little incentive for organizations to really improve the interactions through innovation.  In fact, the economics are such that innovative providers who care enough to try to improve the system usually get penalized in the form of fewer billable hours, fewer reimbursements, or more time away from their private lives.  [Lot's of poorly understood concepts there: incentives, innovation, economics....]

By now most people have turned away to find a more engaging conversation partner.

Then comes the real kicker, transitioning to an innovative service economy requires a new approach to pricing.  A dynamic system that can make visible the value of interactions to both provider and client.  Perhaps using the equivalent of complex numbers (AKA imaginary numbers like the square root of -1) where one component represents the tangible good (supply/demand) and the other represents the intangible (information/quality) parts of the exchange.  Except for true fellow geeks, that’s pretty much a show stopper for the audience.  [And even the geeks are as likely as not to go off on a number theory tangent.]

For the few kind souls that remain, I can finally get to the point – UnaMesa plays the role of a “market maker” for service innovation.  We facilitate and promote better services by “buying” and maintaining software, web services, and other intangibles that support 2-way interactions between providers and clients.  We aim to help create a robust system for the exchange of intangibles and foster service innovation that truly values and makes visible the value of better experience for both providers and clients.

For example, SharedRecords.org is a free, online service for securely storing and sharing medical records, transcripts, and any other information that a doctor, teacher, or social worker needs in order to care for a client.  By making the infrastructure freely available, we ensure that the digital version of the information can be retrieved wherever and whenever needed but it’s always under the control of the client and their providers.  Instead of fighting with the bureaucracy of a hospital or school to get access to their records, clients give the equivalent of a receipt to their caregiver who can instantly access the relevant documents.  From the SharedRecords point of view, timely access to your medical or educational history should be the equivalent of roads, bridges, and waterways, part of the basic infrastructure that we all take for granted.  It should not be a point of competition between service providers.

The alternative approach: UnaMesa as an Open Space for Knowledge

The Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) , and similar conservation organizations, protect natural lands by purchasing private property and converting it into preserves and park lands that benefit the larger community in perpetuity.  In Silicon valley and the larger San Francisco Bay Area, these organizations have played a critical role in maintaining the beautiful landscape and large tracts of wild areas despite the tremendous pressures of commercial development.  The open space supports a vibrant natural ecology that benefits everyone living in the area.

Similarly, the UnaMesa Association seeks to protect and maintain intangible property that supports a healthy knowledge ecology.  We acquire private “intellectual property” on behalf of the community and encourage compatible uses of that knowledge to serve the public interest.  Because UnaMesa is a “not for profit”  organization, individuals and organizations can trust that their use of the software, services, books, or other intangible properties will not be subject to “monetization” by a private property holder who could deny them access or demand royalty payments.

This trust encourages people to build upon the property held by UnaMesa in order to continually improve and add to the knowledge.  Unlike the physical property held by POST, UnaMesa’s goal is not preservation.  Rather we seek continual improvement of an ever expanding knowledge space.  Whereas access to physical property must be limited to avoid the degradation that comes with usage, intangible property and knowledge benefit from widespread & unlimited use.  Fixing a bug in a software program, re-using a lesson plan, or sharing best practices in maintaining medical records benefits all community members.  This is just the opposite of real property where consuming an apple or chopping down a tree makes it unavailable for anyone else.

So, UnaMesa acquires intellectual property, maintains it and makes it accessible to the community while promoting compatible uses that increase the pool and value of knowledge.

Similar to POST, we operate as a Trust to hold intellectual property in the public interest and work with the broader community to identify properties of interest and solicit the resources necessary to acquire those properties.  In some cases, this might mean getting a compatible license rather than acquiring the copyright directly.  These licenses are analogous to “conservation easements” and other arrangements that POST might use to protect natural lands.

The TiddlyWiki community is a good example of this whole process.  TiddlyWiki is a piece of wiki software that runs directly in a web browser.  It’s a bit like the software behind Wikipedia except it does not require any server side software.  This means that any individual or organization can create their own wiki and have complete control over how that wiki operates.  They can share the wiki with others by simply sending them an HTML file.  No Internet connection is required to view or to add to the information.  UnaMesa acquired the TiddlyWiki core software in 2007 from Osmosoft, a small software development group.  This ensured that the TiddlyWiki software remained accessible and supported by the community even after Osmosoft was purchased by British Telecom later in the year.  Over time, the number and types of uses has continued to grow and evolve.   TiddlyWiki is now used in a wide variety of settings, including by students and teachers sharing class notes, doctors maintaining medical notes, and as a tracking tool for engineering project managers  – in addition to the core function of being a personal notebook.  UnaMesa supports this community by hosting a software and knowledge repository at TiddlyWiki.org, paying for maintenance and improvement to the core code, and responding to requests for help on the newsgroups.  In return, community members contribute “plugin” software that improves the function of TiddlyWiki, templates and example documents for others to use, and plenty of support to each other through the online forums.

Just as POST is not the only conservation group, UnaMesa is not alone in trying to create an open space for knowledge.  Creative Commons has done a tremendous job in drafting and promoting copyright licenses (e.g. “easements”) that encourage reuse and distribution.  The Free Software Foundation, the Apache Foundation, and the Mozilla Foundation are the better known examples of groups that promote the development and distribution of open source software.  I liken these groups to agricultural or land use coops where a group of farmers might come together to protect their access to water or build a shared processing plant.

The primary focus of the software foundations lies in developing specific pieces of sofware.  They’re generally run by and for the developers to spell out the rules of how software updates are contributed, who gets to decide what code goes in the “official” release, etc.  To my knowledge, however, these organizations do not generally pay developers for their contributions, they do not focus on the needs of service providers (e.g. education, healthcare, social services), and they do not seek to acquire other types of intangible property that would serve the larger community.

UnaMesa is still a very young organization and very much an experiment in ways to improve service innovation.  We believe that there’s a tremendous and productive middle ground for innovation and knowledge that lies between the extremes of private “free” property.  The conservation model of POST provides some interesting analogues for us to follow.

In the end,  UnaMesa wants to do two things:

• Make sure that the developers, writers, teachers, and other creative folk can earn a decent living, while
• Encouraging and promoting widespread access to knowledge that’s necessary for delivering the best possible education, healthcare and social services

In other words, we want to help create the foundation for a healthy service economy where we, as a society, can see and make decisions based more on the quality of interactions and rely less on the industrial notions of supply and demand.

Well, I’m still not sure if the POST analogy works better.  Will have to try it out at the next dinner party and see how many people fall asleep.  Sure can’t be worse than the old approach!

Call recording link: http://sra.sharedrecords.org/records/c07fd49e37f72f6c9e2dcf8dfd9440130dcf1c52.data
These notes also posted at: http://www.projects.unamesa.org/2008-12-10

Agenda

Wikispaces discussions work update – Saq, Martin
Forms work - Saq
JavaRosa X forms in TiddlyWiki feedback – Martin, Eric
Discussions with Wikispaces/Tangient - Greg
Hesperian update if any (MOU) – Greg
End of year UM report/newsletter – Greg, Saq
Academy update - Heather
UnaMesa Goals 2009 feedback - all
Other updates from associates

Participants

• Marianne
• Greg
• Heather
• Cory
• Barak
• Saq

Apologies

• Paul
• Martin (Osmosoft offices being moved)

Wikispaces Discussions

Greg

• I’ve been talking with Adam at Tangient (the company behind wikispaces) and they’re very open to having a more formal business relationship so that we can more fully support our partner projects (i.e. Hesperian and Student Notebook)
• there have been some API requests from Saq and Martin outstanding – they are now responding to those requests which should be done in a short time

Saq (this section of the call recording is missing due to Marianne having been dropped from the call – the following notes on the API work was received via email from Saq and should cover the missing part of the call)

• API
  • Greg has initiated discussions with Adam at Wikispaces with an aim to formalizing our agreement with them.
  • As a result of this they seem more open to considering our API requests.
  • However, one thing to keep in mind is that Wikispaces does some things very differently from the TiddlyWiki model. Eg: tags are not part of the metadata associated with a page but rather with the user as different users can have different tags for the same page. So I am keeping this in mind when discussing API requests with Adam and am not asking for things that would contradict their current model and am focusing on the enhancements that we most need.
• Discussions work
  • finished UI and put it on the mixins wiki – http://mixins.projects.unamesa.org/User+Interface – the recipe is posted there as well as a cooked file – it allows you to import messages from wikispaces, they get displayed in the UI that is tagged based on the page that the messages correspond to
  • I’ve made sure that it’s not wikispaces specific at all – I’ve also detailed in the discussions items some thoughts on how the uploads will work
  • the part that’s missing is uploading those messages back to the server – Martin is working on this now

Forms Work

Saq

• Chris Dent had some questions with regards to the different plugins and templates that comprise the UM Academy forms work and sent an email to Eric
• (Eric) – he was asking if he had the gist of it correct, which he did – I’d like to have a direct chat channel to him
• (Saq) – Chris is usually on the tiddlywiki.org IRC channel
• (Greg) – Chris is working on the backend – right now the data part is being sent to a service that’s just sending email – we need to determine if we want to enable the back end to accept the entire TW or just the form component
• (Cory) – Andreas is currently reworking on a piece of routing API that we built for a project to do X form routing – it maybe be appropriate to know more about the use cases that you’re trying to support and see if these can be used for that as well

JavaRosa X forms in TiddlyWiki

Greg

• (Eric) – I set up the AICRC test form using the standard TW custom templates for viewing and editing – the other part of that doc is a script that reads the fields from tiddler and merges them with a text format that’s also stored in another tiddler ( a ‘fill in the blank’ approach) – the text is then transmitted to a server side URL – in this particular instance, the blanks being filled in was an email template and then it was being sent to an email dispatcher – this same mechanism could be handed a tidder template which would be an xml doc (instead of email)
  • the most recent AICRC forms (version 0.1.6) are at http://aicrc.projects.unamesa.org/ – click on “aicrc.html” in the left hand navigation column
• (Greg) – some background for everyone – the way that X forms handles forms is two parts
  • one an xml template which is the result of filling out the form, this template has the appropriate blanks in it
  • the other piece is the display logic which is the “view” template, which is another xml doc that is used to generate and drive the display to put up the buttons and things like that – that’s a bit more complicated and one area where I need to talk with Eric more to see if and how it would make sense to have a formatter which could look at that xml doc and generate the appropriate layout
• (Jon) – the JavaRosa community is moving nice along – Cory has been working on a project to take images for a cervical cancer screening project we’re working on in Zambia – we’re really worried that a lot of the work we’re doing is going to be thrown out by either switching to a proprietary platform like Cybian or going with Android for future development because the limitations of J2ME we found at the mobile end are incredibly constraining with other use cases that will be coming up – from a strategic standpoint, we’re not sure what that will mean for the JavaRosa community and whether we’ll have to make a shift in terms of what language we’ll support moving forward – there’s been an increase in the numbers of the JavaRosa community who have received funding to do Android projects, which is also in danger of fracturing the existing collaborative environment we have because everyone will need to rush to get those projects done and not use common code base
  • this will get sorted out in the next couple of months – it’s exciting but problematic because alot of the good work that has gone into JavaRosa might not be applicable
  • along with the cervical cancer screening project, we’re rethinking how to do the web side for viewing images and annotating comments on them – Cory pointed out that this was the original use case we thought of for the TW SharedRecords integration – the solution we might end up going with is to use dropbox as the sync protocal because it’s very good and also free right now – sync the binary images and then annotate them using Jengo or TW as the front end – this is the exact use case that we proposed early on and then thought it would be neat to deploy this on a USB key so that it could work out of the box – so we have a real live use case for that hypothetical scenario we came up with back then
  • the major concerns Cory and I have is solving the conflicting comment problem – we’d like feedback regarding whether it makes sense to drive the TW/SRs use case
    • (Greg) – I’d like to spend some time looking at the problem statement, understanding what’s needed and how we might be able to facilitate – this is the kind of think I’d like to understand how to support even if we don’t actively support it
• (Jon) – one more thing on X forms – one of the engineers on the JavaRosa team built a jar that can run the X form engine that can be run on a mobile device, so it will break whenever an X form would break on the mobile device so it’s a good tool for anyone looking at the X form rendering – you can use it to test that the rendering forms will run on a mobile – I’ll send a link out for this

Discussions with Wikispaces/Tangient

Greg

Hesperian

Greg

• we have an MOU that they’re reviewing
• we were supposed to have a meeting Monday but they postponed it until Jan. for the Digital Advisory Council so there won’t be much to report until then

End of year UM report/newsletter

Greg

• I sent out an email askng for feedback and links that are the most important regarding each project – if you haven’t yet done this, please do so by the end of the week – I’d like to finish up the end of the year summary of what we’ve done as well as goals for 2009 and then make those available to all the stakeholders and also use it to send out to anyone who is interested in UM

Hesperian

Greg

• target is to start helping them with the table of contents (TOC) starting in Jan. 2009
  and also to look at what content management system would make the most sense for their full production process
• for the TOC, we’re recommending that they use a wiki with a TW version that can be used offline
• there will intially be about 40 people (partners) contributing to the TOC

Academy

Heather

• the video has been uploaded and can be seen at http://aicrc.projects.unamesa.org/Paper+Process+Videos
• I’ve been focusing on writing up the procedures and a report which will be done by Friday
• we’re continuing trying to find an intermediary
  • Paul has heard from someone
  • I heard from a legal services provider – Insight Center – which is an economic development non-profit but they have a legal unit that provides services to economic development non-profits
    • the attorney there contacted me to see if there’s something we can do so I sent her some info and will be over there for a different project on Friday and will also try to schedule a meeting with her

UnaMesa Goals 2009

Greg

• (Cory) – Dimagi is constantly faced with the issue of ramping up small projects and putting together new wikis and integrating our technologies – would it be useful as we’re ramping up the projects we’re participating in (such as Hesperian and TeamPlay) to have a running blog of the internal collaboration as a document of best practices
• (Greg) – yes, a good idea – also, I didn’t put on the goals that for 2009 one of my top goals is to have more communication with the community and part of that will be a blog on which I’ll take the lead and post to it once/week – we can also have each associate posting as well
• (Barak) – it’s sometimes hard to know what UM is doing so a blog is a good idea as opposed to a wiki – the tools we use are great for collaboration but are not great for communicating beyond our group – there’s a “rule” that goes, “90% read, 10% comment & 1% create” – a lot of UM’s communication is for the 1% of those who create and I’d love in 2009 for a goal to be to reach those who read and comment – those people in the community who care about the work and want to read about it but don’t want to get involved in the creating – broadcasting vs co-creating would be good
• (Saq) – I agree – we need a more accessible way to follow what UM is doing and a blog is a good way to go – I think, though, that if we’re going to use the current UM blog – http://blog.unamesa.org/ – the conference call notes aren’t what visitors there will want to read so it might be better to just put a link to the notes there – I also think that having multiple people posting is a good idea
• (Barak) – it makes sense to think ahead of time about who the audience is and what the organization is trying to say
• (Greg) – before the 1st of the year, I’ll be drafting the initial posts
• (Cory) – the use case we’re working with now is that we have enough collaborators so we’re in the process of getting onto a more robust wikispaces platform but we know that the main contacts/stakeholders are never going to look at the wiki and will only use email, the more junior members of the team are proactive and will do whatever we ask and the others could go either way – do we want a prepackaged solution from UM to say, “You download wikispaces, you set it up like this, and you use TW to do the offline sync.” – is that the type of service that UM wants to provide?
• (Greg) – I don’t think we’ve figured out the best practice there – the Student Notebook is the best example and we’re just now getting feedback on that – eventually that’s where we’re headed – the most important part of the best practice is to make sure we have someone who can integrate the info from the different channels (i.e. email, offline and online wikis) to make sure the info is current and well attended to – rather than technology, I think that Marianne is the most important part of our collaboration infrastructure at the moment
  • my goal is,”here is the recommended best practice” so the decision process is less for someone who wants to get started – that is what Saq is doing with the demonstration student notebook
  • (Saq) – I think we’re trying to make sure all this technology we’ve developed is generic enough so that those who want to use it can still use their own server backend – I’m hoping we’ll eventually get to the point where we can recommend certain tools for different scenarios
  • (Greg) – agenda item for 1st call of 2009 - have a page where all the adaptors that are working are listed so we have a place to point people saying, “If you have your data in this format, here’s how you can take it offline or put it into a TW for personal customization.”

Additional Items

Greg

• as far as the follow up Saq will be sending out to the TW groups – it’ll be good to include a list of domains, both current and planned
• (Saq) – I plan to put together a list of all the domains & services we provide for tiddlywiki.org

Saq

• in the last year many people have asked if there’s a person they can contact for custom TW development work to be done ranging from small personal websites to rather elaborate verticals on TW – I’ve recommended the developers group or Eric – is this something UM wants to get involved in?
• (Greg) – we would be willing to either do that work or be the project manager for the work under the condition that the person requesting the work is providing the funds to do it, or the majority of the funds and that work would then be available to the community at large

Eric

• TW version 2.4.2 will go into beta in a week and a half and will have the official release in January – so over the next couple of weeks I’ll be troubleshooting
• the increase in traffic to TiddlyTools has not dropped off – I’ll have gotten over 1/4 million hits on that one document alone for the year
• over the last month I’ve been working on “moveable panels” – imagine taking a TW doc and being able to tear off the tiddlers and put them wherever you want much like you do with a windows desktop, I’ve also made the page infinitely expandable

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

• General
• Academy

Action Items for 12/10 – 2/17

End of year UM Report/Newsletter – each associate view http://tasks.projects.unamesa. org/Summary2008 and add their top 3
links for the work they have performed over the past year.

**Goals for 2009** - review it - all

Wikispaces Discussion work – uploading – let Saq know where it’s at - Martin

JavaRosa Jar – send link - Jon

Agenda for call on 12/17

agenda item for 1st call of 2009** – have a page where all the adaptors that are working are listed

Call Details

Call recording link: http://sra.sharedrecords.org/records/05873a4be74e1ceb5cbc47b0567f104a4af576fd.data

These notes also posted at: http://www.projects.unamesa.org/2008-11-19

Agenda

Academy update - Heather (if any)
Support system for UM technology infrastructure update – Saq
MediaWiki/Wikispaces update – Martin
Forms work update – Saq
Other updates from associates

Participants

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

Apologies

• Cory (traveling through Nov. 19th)
• Jonathan – conflicting meetings

UM Academy

Heather

• tomorrow we’ll have a meeting with AICRC to discuss whether or not they’ll implement the forms
• I contacted Rebecca regarding filming the current paper process which may take place tomorrow
  • (Greg) – I’m looking forward to seeing the video which will help us as we’re designing the back end – having more examples will be really helpful
• pursuing the intermediary idea of finding a single organization that we can work with
  • I contacted Scott at CARD
    • he added some info and graphics on the card wiki at http://card.projects.unamesa.org/Forms+and+Input
    • Paul and I agree that CARD doesn’t really have much of a forms piece to it so they might not be the ideal partner on this project
    • (Greg) – I think we need to continue contact with CARD – at the moment though it seems they’re trying to design new information flows, not just capture them
  • I contacted the Women’s Cancer Resource Center, which is busy til the end of the year
    • they are a part of the Women’s Cancer Initiative so they’re talking about doing a common form for all the groups within the Initiative
    • (Greg) – this sounds like good lead – if it is focused on an individual form or a set of forms that a number of organizations use, that’s definitely what we’re looking for
      • I sent an email to Sara yesterday asking for a contact at the WCI
  • (Paul) – we’re also looking a EAP which is a cmmon online app which has been developed for a range of social service providers in the SF East Bay
• I’m in the process of organizing the curriculum and putting it together in a way that makes the most sense

NonProfit Technology Development Summit

Greg

• took place this week
• I spoke with Ben Wolf, the developer on Open MRS – the technology back end for medical record systems
  • they have the potential to be an intermediary
  • they have a couple of partners – one of whom is WHO which has packaged a version of Open MRS for clinics
    • they have a package of the schemas and the data entry
    • almost all of their installations are in Africa or S. America
    • Ben was very interested in the potential to gather data via paper and mobile as well as on the web
    • apparently there’s a person in Uganda who developed JavaRosa as a front end for entering data into Open MRS
    • the ability to store scanned images will be online in about a month
    • we should contact them regarding the technology side but Ben suggests that we contact WHO for the organizational side

Support System for UM Technology Infrastructure

Saq

• the wiki for the support system is set up and I’ve set up pages for TW and SRs
• I’ve sent an email to Andreas to make sure he is up to date on what we’re doing
• I’ll let the TW community know about the set up and Andreas can let Dimagi know about SRs

Additional Updates

Saq
TiddlyTumbles

• Roger has been having some trouble with scanning in docs so he’ll send them to me via mail and I’ll scan them in

Andrew Lister

• he’s finally free of the backlog so we’ll work on getting the public demo out by next week
• we’ll try to time it so that the screencast that he wants will be available at the same time as well

Univ. of Oslo Presentation

• I’ll be giving this presentation regarding medical records sharing this Friday
• I’ve had some interest regarding having a discussion afterwards with some other attendees geared more towards medical records sharing in underprivileged regions

Greg
Crag Wolfe

• he’s someone who has been working on another project with me and also is getting up to speed on the infrastructure
• he’s agreed to be ‘on call’ to help out if/when we need help with hosting issues
• he’s built some virtual machines so we have a little bit more capacity there
• (Marianne) in case there is a problem and Andreas is not available, Crag’s contact info is here http://private.projects.unamesa.org/Associates. He will also be on the unamesa-team google group email list.

UM Board Meeting

• there will be a Board meeting this Friday where we’ll be setting some plans for 2009
• between now and our next call on Wed., Dec. 3rd, I’ll put those notes into a report on what we accomplished in 2008 and what we hope to do in 2009
  • I’ll circulate that by email and post it to the wiki – I’ll look for your feedback
• I reviewed what we’d set out to do in 2008 and found that we made more progress in some areas than I’d anticipated and less in others so for 2009, I’d like to build on the things that have worked and be pretty clear about both discontinuing projects where we’re not making traction and also making sure that we’re identifying where the real value is for the community in terms of getting some additional business models and perhaps some people from the TW community to pledge contributions of some type
• if there are things you think we should be or could be doing better, now would be a great time to send that to me and use the time next week when we won’t be having our call, to think about the longer term issues of where you’d like to see us heading as well as what we should do more of or less of

Mediawiki/Wikispaces

Martin

• I’ve been working on the mediawiki adaptor to get the edit working
• (Greg) – we haven’t had any feedback from the folks at mediawiki yet – if you have an update I’ll send that to them and ask for additional feedback

Wikispaces

• I haven’t started on that yet but we’ll still on track for having this done by the end of the year
• (Saq) – I’m going to start working on the styling aspects by putting together a plugin that displays the discussion the way we want and that will be completely ignorant of the underlying wikispaces basics so we can use it with mediawiki as well
  • I’ll make it configurable so you can find threads and topics within them

Greg

• regarding the JavaRosa X forms – I’m looking for thoughts on whether it will be possible to use that representation within TW – is this a promising path?
  • everyone I’ve talked with recognizes that the ability to have a single forms specification that can work on the web and mobile and, ideally, paper would be a serious contribution to the entire space

Forms Work

Saq

• we’ve worked out the terms under which Chris Dent will be working on this for UM
• Greg and Chris have put together a prototype that consists of being able to retrieve and save back to different forms – Chris started work on this last week
• I’ve invited Chris to be on the weekly conference calls or to simply report to me before the calls so that I can give updates
• (Greg) – I’ve created a space at http://formsbiz.projects.unamesa.org/ for further discussion on forms. It’s a private space so if you’re interested, request access and Marianne will approve it

Paul

• Saq sent around a link to www.in4ama.org which is an interesting tool in terms of an open platform for forms creation – I think it might be worth exploring further
• (Saq) – I’m a bit undecided on it, partly because of the pdf format but I’m looking forward to looking at the code to see how it works and how it might relate to the forms solution that we’re implementing – if nothing else, it will at least be good if the two can talk to each other
• (Greg) – the one issue with it is that you need acrobat in order to be able to fill out the forms so maybe we could have a TW front end that can talk to the same back end

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

• General
• Academy

Action Items for 11/19 – 12/03

Intermediary organization suggestions – send ideas to Paul or Heather - All
JavaRosa X forms – take a look at it and give feedback on if it makes sense to go forward with it - Martin & Eric

Agenda for call on 12/03

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

• General
• Academy

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

Call recording link: http://sra.sharedrecords.org/records/8b7b0c9a9d20b7f54701580583298b0b1bf5cf29.data

These notes also posted at: http://www.projects.unamesa.org/2008-10-22 & http://blog.unamesa.org/

NOTE: British Summer Time ends this Sat., Oct. 26th. This means that next week’s call will be one hour earlier for those in regions that observe BST. (I’ll update that info when I send the call reminder and make I’ve figured it correctly.) Daylight Savings Time will be ending in the states the following Sat., Nov. 2nd so there will be further time adjustments regarding the conference call at that time.

Agenda

Academy update - Heather
Wikispaces messages work - Martin
EC2, mediawiki migration and Trac problems update - Andreas
Hesperian – Greg
Other updates from associates

Participants

• Marianne
• Eric
• Heather
• Jon
• Cory
• Martin
• Paul
• Barak

UM Academy

Heather

• the UM Academy has been split into what is essentially one 8hr session for when working with one organization
  • the first half of training – the technology overview – was done with the AICRC on Monday by Eric, Paul and myself
    • Eric did an overview of TW and how it works – the AICRC staff were very interested, had good ideas and questions
    • notes from day one are here http://private.projects.unamesa.org/AICRC+Academy+Notes
    • their questions and comments can be read at http://private.projects.unamesa.org/Staff+Q%27s+%26+Comments
    • they had two main questions
      • can each student TW be hosted from the server? – Eric said it’s possible but requires access to their server
      • where to start? – the youth advocate wanted to start with their primary data collection form as opposed to the form we did start with (the student information/enrollment form)
  • the second half of the training will be the hands on session that will take place this Friday
    • we’ll do a recap of TW
    • they’ll each be at a computer and Eric will walk the through the enrollment form
    • we’ll have an overhead projection so they can see what Eric does
    • the enrollment form is usually filled out by parents so Paul had a great idea of doing role playing with it – one group can be the parents and the other group can be the staff – two different user groups using the same form. This will give us an idea of what structural changes need to take place so that it will make sense to parents
    • we’ll also be showing them the wikispace we’ll be using for tech support – http://aicrc.projects.unamesa.org/Tech+Support
  • (Greg) – on Friday first make sure that they are using a network file sharing system now that they know how to use – if they are, then do some experiments to be sure the TWs will work for them – 2nd, see if they currently have a protocol for not interfering with each others edits
  • (Heather) – they seem to not have a problem with interfering with each others editing of a document and I believe they don’t care if it’s on their server or on the web
    • (Paul) – exactly – they just need for it to be secure and accessible
  • (Greg) – as far as the forms themselves – what is the form the youth advisor wants to work on an what are the current problems with it
    • (Heather) – it’s http://private.projects.unamesa.org/New+Narrative – and it was suggested because it’s something they can use immediately because it’s something that’s used daily. The enrollment form, on the other hand, is used only once/year. The case mgmt form is also used alot
  • (Greg) – we need a wiki for AICRC so they’ll have information and a place for requesting technical support – let’s set up http://aicrc.projects.unamesa.org for that – the main page should have the results of the training and all the resources and for the tech support page, make contact info available and specific instructions on how to post to the wiki – Heather and/or Eric should monitor it and respond to questions
    • (Heather) – during the training we could have blank wiki with whatever navigation Marianne plugs in – we can show them the page and type in the instructions at the same time and we can set up the logins then too
      • (Greg) – it would be great to have them add their questions directly on the wiki on Friday – and when setting up the logins, usually an email invitation is sent to each person but it can also be set up manually
    • (Heather) – the other option we discussed would be to set up their own wiki that is not associated with UM so that we wouldn’t need to give them UM logins
    • (Greg) – for them it would be transparent – we could change the domain of the wiki we set up to be wiki.aicrc.org or any domain name they want without any problem – doing it under our system means they won’t have to deal with any admin issues
      • for example spot.us – http://wiki.spot.us/ – is a project I’ve been working on and they have a wiki on UM wikispaces that they’ve been able to start a couple of fundraising campaigns on and people don’t recognize that it’s hosted on the UM site
  • (Paul) – coming through this first round of academy training, behind the scenes we’re looking at different business models for the training as well as the tools and the packaging of them within the training context, so as we come out of this, we’re putting forth some ideas on business modeling and we’re looking forward to getting some feedback from the whole team on that

Wikispaces messages

Martin

• no progress on this to report
• (Greg) – as I understand it, it’s functional with some issues still re: API requests
  • is the discussion component take care of now
  • (Martin) – there’s still some outstanding work there – the comments component is still not working
    • the wikispaces APIs are currently quite difficult to use for doing relatively straightforward things but the wikispaces people do not view this as a priority for them so we’re waiting for them to have time to fix these – this however is not a blocking issue for us
• (Greg) – the trac and subversion site seems to be working okay for you and osmosoft now? (Martin) – that’s back up
• (Greg) – is work continuing on the ripplerap server and especially the integration with confab, do you know if Phil is still actively working on that? (Martin) – he hasn’t been working on that for some time now, They got to a stage of basic functionality about 4 months ago and there’s been no active work since then
  • (Greg) – I ask because I was talking with Zelie (?) Ishmael yesterday of Confab about some of the ways that UM could support some of that work – one of the pieces that’s still an issue is, for example, the Mobile Active Conference which just took place in S. Africa last week used some of the note taking facilities but there were a few issues on the server side or synchronization side – so he’s going to give me a list of the issues so I wanted to know the status of the development an who’s responsible for the server side (Martin) – I think we’ve handed off the server side stuff to Confab however if there’s specific issues, I’m sure we can look into those – and Phil is an excellent person to contact (Greg) – I alo want to see if there can be more integration with the TiddlyWeb work & TiddlyHome stuff
• (Greg) – did you have a chance to look at the JavaRosa and OpenRosa stuff (Martin) – I started to look at that just before this call

JavaRosa/OpenRosa

Cory/Jon (minutes 27 – 33 – there was some breaking up so the notes below are not comprehensive)

• the Mobile Active conference was good for JavaRosa & OpenRosa – a lot of people knew about it
  • there’s still a lot of work to get to a JavaRosa 1.0 that can download and install on a phone and download an xform
  • alot of developers there have been working on it on projects of their own
  • two of our programmers have funding to work on it throught the end of the year
  • it was clear that one of the main areas of movement but not with alot of coordination is on the server side – there’s a call on Monday for which I can send the details to anyone interested
  • another consortium has been started called OpenMobile – I don’t understand technically what they’re doing that’s different
    • (Greg) – should I ask Katrin about OpenMobile (Jon) – Neil might be better

EC2

Greg

• we’ve made a complete transition to EC2
• SRs and TW sites are close to functioning correctly again – if that’s not the case, please let us know
• we want establish some rules for managing our infrastructure – if you want to be a part of that conversation, go to the UM technology infrastructure wiki which is private
• I’ve been speaking with a person who has some assistant administrator experience who may be able to help us out when we need additional support on hosting and such
  • if anyone knows things that should be done or that you’d like to be done, please let me know so we can put together a statement of work so we can get some of it done shortly and it’d be a way to introduce this other person to the hosting architecture so he could help out when Andreas is unavailable – the suggestions might have to do with TiddlyForms, SRs or media wiki hosting

Hesperian

Greg

• I met with them last week and they’re very excied about movng forward
• we’re putting together a site for project http://hesperian.projects.unamesa.org which includes my notes from that meeting
• key notes
  • this is a multi year project
  • about 3 years from now they plan to release a minimum of five new chapters of content for the book Where There Is No Doctor
    • these chapters will be accessible digitally and viewed or accessed on mobile phones as well as repackaged by workers in different regions either in diff languages or in conjunction with local information
    • what it means to develop this material with their many partners around the globe is still to be decided over the next few months by figuring out the technology approach and running a couple of pilot projects
    • the first project will be related to the table of contents where they’ll be asking their partners to use some online tools to edit and collaboratively create it
    • after that there will be some pilot projects to test out the delivery of the initial content through online platform and through mobile phones – the planning for this will take place over the next 6 months
    • this is a great project for us and it will be fun to work with them

Additional Items

Greg

• I was at the Social Capital Conference last week
  • they had planned for about 200 people but 650 showed up
  • I met a few people who are interested in following up on the mobile technologies with the MORE project but no direct feedback yet
• Workshop for the technology infrastructure for emerging regions (TIER) group at UCBerkeley
  • a group run by Eric Brewer that’s been going on for 5 years
  • one of the 1st projects we did was the Origins project with Tier just when UM was getting started
  • I found out that Schwartzman has taken that work to a creative prototype that she has tested in Oahaca, Mexico where they’re doing registration and certification of local farms for organic or fair trade certification and doing that certification using mobile phones – now Yale is looking for funding and a business partner for that work and some of the people in the fair trade community are interested
    • just an example of how some of this stuff does eventually take off
  • Neil’s site I think is http://digitalicslatino.org/
• UM Board meeting to take place in Nov.

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

• General
• Academy

Action Items for 10/22 – 10/29

JavaRosa/OpenRosa call on Mon., Oct. 27th – if you want to join, contact Jon for details

Agenda for call on 10/29

Academy update – 1st full session of academy pilot – Heather
Wikispaces update
JavaRosa/OpenRosa SMS based work update
EC2 migration – let Andreas or Greg know if you’re experiencing problems - all
UM technology infrastructure discussion – let Greg or Marianne know if you’d like access to the private site for participating in it - all
UM technology infrastructure – let Greg know if there are things you’d like to see done so he can compile a work statement – all
Hesperian – check out notes at **http://hesperian.projects.unamesa.org** – all
Mobile Active space discussion

Call recording link: http://sra.sharedrecords.org/records/d0f6b6c7b9d1c68ea349bdcf2514cb2d7be4cad6.data
These notes also posted at: http://www.projects.unamesa.org/2008-10-01

Agenda

Academy update - Heather
Wikispaces update - Martin and Saq
EC2 and TiddlyWiki.org update: Andreas and Saq
EC2 and SharedRecords update: Greg
Other updates from associates

Participants

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

Apologies

• Paul – can be on call every other week
• Jonathan – will be out of town today and for next two weeks (8th & 15th)

UM Academy

Heather

• academy restructure
  • original idea was to bring in two or three organizations, have 6 – 12 people present for collaborative training and learning process
  • it’s been very hard to get the organizations to participate
  • still have the same overall goal but have decided to break it down into smaller steps
    • a single organization – maybe 2 people
      • one who has a good sense of how the different depts work together
      • someone who has the biggest bulk of generating files
      • (Greg) – it will be one on one training specifically focused on the organization and Eric would be one of the key people to go onsite at their locations to help craft forms specifically to fill their needs
    • one or two day training
    • will have pretraining needs assessment (instead of doing this during the training)
    • more emphasis on post training, implementation, tech support
    • instead of a ‘for fee’ model, will have a ‘pay it forward’ model – participants will be asked to do the following in exchange for the training
      • participate in a collaborative training, contribute to the UM community, document learning process
    • 1st pilot training will take place the week of Oct. 20th
• potential pilot participants – each has partners we can reach out to later
  • • CARD – the disaster preparedness organization is on the list and the nex step is to have a meeting
      • (Greg) – I spoke with Scott, the director, and he’s in the process of designing a system from scratch in order to train the trainers – he’ll get back to me when he has a concise vision of their needs (probably in a couple of weeks)
    • Paul and I are meeting with the American Indian Child Resource Center tomorrow
    • Dirk signed up for a phone meeting about his charter schools
    • there’s also a healthcare organization that we will be setting up a meeting with
• application
  • (Eric) – a new copy of the tiddlywiki with the application form in it is posted at http://unamesa.org/academy/
    • as an online version, it does not have new document and saved document command in the left column – instead it has download document
    • you can fill in the form and submit it and then you will be given a choice to download it – the download will have your completed form which will be saved locally
    • currently the forms will be sent to 3 addresses: academy@unamesa.org, heather@unamesa.org and els@unamesa.org .
    • all scripts are hosted on the unamesa.org site and so is the document
      • when the form is submitted, it gives a thank you message which needs to have instructions for saving the document added
    • Heather and I updated the content

Wikispaces

Saq

• the news from Andrew Lister is that there haven’t been any problems
  • he’ll be doing the review with the students in a couple weeks and we’ll find out then how many are actively using the student notebook
  • the instructor’s notebook has been very useful to Andrew
    • he prefers entering his data through tiddlywiki (as opposed to wikispaces) – I’ll forward his reasons to everyone
  • the students would like way to print out the slides that belong to a lecture and have the option to include their notes or not – so I’m working on a plug in for that
  • I’ve spoken with Andrew about setting up a public demo because I’d like it to have actual content
    • he’ll put together content that he’s allowed to redistribute in a couple weeks
  • I’ve also looked at the code base from the point of view of being able to set up a service where people can go to say, “This is my wikispaces site and I’d like a notebook that synchronizes with it.”
    • for the student notebook this will be straightforward
    • the teacher’s notebook will take more work because we customized it for Andrew’s course and he’s quite familiar with TW so there were things we didn’t have to worry about – so I think it’s good idea to roll out a service where you can get a generic notebook that synchronizes with the wikispaces space and then introduce an instructor’s notebook later on
  • I haven’t heard anything back from Adam regarding our wikispaces request
• messaging
  • (Martin) – I hope to make good progress by the end of the week
    • next step is to get the creation and upload of the discussions going

EC2

Saq

• svn.tiddlywiki.org and track.tiddlywiki.org have been moved over to the EC2 server
• the skin changes from track have not been moved over to the new server – we’ll have to decide if it was useful and whether or not to port it over
• there’s a slight issue with track permissions right now and not being able to get confirmation emails sent out
  • (Eric) – I noticed about a 3 week gap in the ticket numbers of the track system
• the media wiki still needs to be moved over – tiddlywiki.org – Andreas will work on that this weekend and I’ll inform the community when I have more details

SharedRecords Move to EC2

Greg

• all services have been moved and DNS has been updated so you should now see SRs servers including sharedrecords.org and sra.sharedrecords.org
  • I’m getting better responsiveness
• our goal is be completely off the CGNet servers by the end of Oct. – tiddlywiki.org is the last piece still there

Additional Items

Eric

• heavy stream of people coming to tiddlytools is still pouring in – there might be 6000 hits this week

Greg

• I spoke with the CA state person who is responsible for HIV/Aids prevention
  • they have a problem with collecting records – they have over 500,000/year from several agencies and currently it’s all done on paper
  • I spoke with them about possibly using SRs as an improved way to do it
  • they might also be interested in some of the forms work
  • I’ll be talking with them again later this month at a summit
  • they deal with a broad range of partners from small clinics in rural areas to high traffic urban centers
• SRs
  • having a demo where you can upload a file and get a token back is one of the services I’d like to get back online
    • perhaps Dimagi could support that demo – it might be a useful tool for you to use in other areas
  • Andreas will put up the virtual machine so people can download and run a version of SRs locally
    • it might be useful to bake in a demo into that system as well

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

• General
• Academy

Action Items for 10/01- 10/08

gap in tickets of tracking system – send email to Saq and Andreas regarding this – Eric

current version of sra.records.org – run some tests to see if performance is improved – Cory

Agenda for call on 10/08

Academy update – Heather

Call recording link: http://sra.sharedrecords.org:8080/SRCDataStore/RESTServlet/0b08a296df9e8d110398aec9962fe05348cf514f.data
These notes also posted at: http://www.projects.unamesa.org/2008-09-24

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

• General
• Academy

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

Call recording link: http://sra.sharedrecords.org:8080/SRCDataStore/RESTServlet/db30fe5819a6245eb7a468240d5fdd46cf10669b.data
These notes also posted at: http://www.projects.unamesa.org/2008-09-10 & http://blog.unamesa.org/

Agenda

Academy update - Heather & Paul
TiddlyTumbles (Dr. in Scotland update) – Saq
Wikispaces work with Andrew Lister – Saq
Wikispaces discussions work – Martin
Amazon EC engine for the hosting services update - Andreas
Discussion regarding architecture of TiddlyForms
Discussion regarding architecture for OpenRosa and mobile data collection in general

Participants

• Marianne
• Heather
• Saq
• Eric
• Greg
• Jon

Apologies

• Martin
• Barak

UM Academy

Heather

• Marianne reorganized the Academy wiki so it’s easier to navigate and the formatting is consistent
• Application
  • for the pilot, the application will be a TW that will be sent to an email address since the data won’t need to be compiled & sorted
  • (Eric) – if I get the finalized application (post feedback) soon, I’ll have the TW form completed by Monday, the 15th
  • (Greg) – any questions not specifically related to their work flow should be removed from the application
• recruiting
  • this is the big focus right now as we’re struggling with it
    • getting people to call back is a problem
    • (Paul) – the challenges are: generating interest, making sure we’re connecting with the right folks, we tried to focus on a couple different target groups (which are listed on the wiki)
      • I think the challenge lies in folks understanding what we’re about and understanding what the value added is AND people being able to find the time to participate
      • we have a blurb coming out on the Craig’s List newsletter this week
      • our more targeted approach hasn’t yielded the results we’d hoped for, so we could contact larger nonprofit networks
      • (Greg) – on the 18th of October is the next Craig’s List Non profit bootcamp in San Mateo which might be good place to get some visibility and maybe even do a one day minipilot – the organizations attending might be too young but attending other such events in person might be best for explaining what the academy is rather than on the phone
• curriculum
  • there were some dead links on the wiki page that have been replaced and will continue to be updated
  • (Greg) – Matt Cam who is a grad student at UCB said he’d be willing to help with the academy as a mentor depending on the dates – I’ll also be talking with Tapan Parikh next week about his participation as well as some of his students
• forms
  • (Saq) – at the end of the academy we can perhaps put together a tool kit for creating forms
  • (Eric) – I’d like to see a repository of forms eventually that people have built from which others can choose

TiddlyTumbles

Saq

• the wiki that Roger Holden in Scotland put together – he’s a doctor who works on fall prevention
  • a fund has been set up for this year and next year
    • one full time doctor and two part time doctors as coordinators
    • there will be regular evaluations – both neurological and by a physiotherapist – to assess which patients are at the greatest risk of falls and how that can be prevented
  • Roger has taken a TW and tried to duplication some of their paper forms and examinations in it to be used as a basis for storing the information about each patient
    • ideally will have one TW/patient which can be saved on their central server which is shared so all would have access to it from any of the clinics
    • he’s done quite well considering he’s not a technical person – he has, however, reached the limit of what he can accomplish using off the shelf TW plugins
    • originally he was looking for help to customize the forms more so they can be printed out as well
    • his colleagues are happy with the concept but not completely happy with how the TW works right now – it needs to be simplified
  • after talking with him, we concluded that:
    • in the short term (in a few weeks) I’ll be providing support to fine tune the TW and they’ll use their server to share documents
    • I also mentioned the infrastructure we’re working on for collecting and sharing forms and he’s willing to try that out when it’s ready and provide feedback
    • I’ve asked him to provide a brief write up of the goals of the project and he’ll also scan the paper forms they use and post them for us to see
  • (Eric) – this sounds like it parallels the forms work we’re doing with Sabrina – I’d be happy to help on this once the Academy pilot is done (mid October)
  • (Saq) – great – the TW that Roger put together is here http://tiddlytumbles.projects. unamesa.org/ – we’ve agreed to start working on it in 3 to 4 weeks

Wikispaces/Andrew Lister

Saq

• Andrew has two classes – one with 42 students and the other with about 250
  • He’d like to use the wikispaces prototype in the smaller class but a last minute change in curriculum made it impossible for him to do so
  • He decided to use it with his larger class instead which meant some changes were needed because of the pedagogy involved and the way the prototype worked– as a result I couldn’t get it finished until today
  • The actual class: http://pols250-2008.projects. unamesa.org/
  • The offline notebook: http://pols250-2008.projects. unamesa.org/space/showimage/ POLS250-StudentNotebook.html
  • The space where we discuss the work being done:
    http://studentnotebook. projects.unamesa.org/

• I think we ended up with a very nice product which works well, is intuitive and easy to use
• The prototype has been refined a lot since we downloaded it for Hesperian
• I sent off the student notebook to Andrew today
• There’s teacher’s notebook that is missing a few tweaks for the presentation plug in which I’ve rewritten from scratch and will be finished tomorrow
• This week he’ll introduce the online wikispaces site to his students and will do a gradual roll out so as not to overwhelm them – next week he’ll introduce the TW notebook
  • I’m expecting some support requests at that time
  • The online site has about 230 students signed up for it currently so I think we’ll be getting some good feedback that will help us to improve the prototype
• Even though the end product is good, the code base is not as well organized as I would like
  • • We started off with a basic wikispaces offline verticals and a recipe in the code base
    • We built on top of that to create Hesperian’s verticals
    • And I built on top of that to create Andrew’s
    • The problem with this dependency is that if I change something in the sidebar for one of them, it gets changed in all of them
• Over the next week I’ll be reworking them in order to get to the point where we have a common code base and a default vertical that we can build that will be a TW that syncs with wikispaces
• Adam from wikispaces has promised a call later this week or next

Amazon EC Engine

Greg

• SRs, the website, & the subversion repository have all been moved over
• The SRA (the work horse server) has not been moved over yet but that should happen this week
• Tiddlywiki.com, tiddlywiki.org and the UM sites are functioning on EC2 now and it’s just a matter of updating the DNS records
  • With the TW site, some of the content needs to be transitioned over and because it’s getting the heaviest use, we’ll make sure we coordinate with the community as we do that
  • We don’t have the dates for those transitions but hope Andreas can handle it this week
• It’s been a slow process but once this is done we should see better performance plus the ability to bring online new projects very quickly
• (Saq) – I heard from Andreas who plans to move the content for tiddlywiki.org, which includes subversion, sometime this afternoon to EC2
• (Greg) – an announcement should be made to the community

TiddlyForms

Greg

• I spent some time putting together the scenario on http://forms.unamesa.org/ for what I think is becoming the standard request

• • for each client there’s a tw which has one or more forms for that client, then the staff member gets an overview list for that client
  • I’d like to start using http://forms.unamesa.org/ as the repository for the demos and also for the scenarios – http://forms.unamesa.org/User+scenario – so we have a clear design target

• • let’s make sure we’re documenting (on the wikispace) what we learn along the way so we can learn more quickly
  • in addition to filling out the forms online, we’d also like to be able to store scanned versions of those forms and have them linked in to the tiddlywikis as well
    • sometimes instead of filling the form out online, you might just scan the form and be able to view it within the TW
      • (Eric) – a person scans a paper form, it’s now an image file which will need to sit on a central server, like SRs. They then get back the SRs cookie and you want to be able to put that link into an embedded image link referencing the document?
      • (Greg) – yes..if it’s a jpeg, it will be embedded as an image but if it’s a pdf you might embed a pdf reader or viewer that can be embedded as a widget
        • I’d like an example of how it looks with a local jpeg and link to a stored record
        • (Erci) – I can do a hand built mock up where I build the attachments with the appropriate links – it wouldn’t necessarily make a live demo of constructing a new one but you could talk through that and show what the result would be
        • (Greg) – that would be useful and could be the template we use for figuring out what the interactivity for actually doing the attachment is
    • (Saq) – next week I’m planning to have some conversations with Chris Dent and Bruno at BidiX about the code base they have and how it relates to what we’re trying to do
      • (Greg) – I took a look at their code bases as a potential back end and I hope we can get them to converge rather than diverge
      • (Saq) – the difference between tiddlyweb and tiddlyhome is that tiddlyhome is envisioned as a hosting service where you can deploy it on your own service and offer people a way to create their own tiddlywikis and deploy your own TW hosting service – there’s no reason the code in the background can’t have more in common.

OpenRosa/JavaRosa

Greg

• Jon Jackson sent around some xml forms this morning
  • These are the html that if we could present them in a TW and make that a useable form within TW then we’d immediately have a population of forms to draw upon and those forms also work on mobile systems
  • the OpenRosa spec isn’t well documented but there’s some information there
    • if we can be the previewer for those forms on the web, I think we’ll eventually become the default for that because it’s almost impossible to do the development of the forms because you don’t want to be using your mobile phone and uploading the forms and testing them that way – you’d rather do it online, get it right, and then work on the mobile phone

Additional Items

Eric

• Google Chrome – there’s a lot of excitement in the community about this – google’s new browser
  • it just gives tabs and page viewing so it’s a simplified browser that gives more of an application feel to your web page which is perfect for TW
  • in terms of TW, it’s a little bit of trouble because the cookies that TW relys upon are not supported by Chrome
  • overall people have had success with loading a TW
  • there’s a problem with saving TWs – it depends on a java applet and for some reason it’s not functioning properly – Jeremy is looking into this
  • (Greg) – do you know if Google Gear is supported within Chrome – that might be one way to support local saving
  • (Eric) – definitely it’s supported in Chrome but not sure how robust it is right now
  • (Saq) – it’s not just our java applet, no java applet is working in Google Chrome right now and the developers are looking into it
    • • the developers have said they will not be supporting cookies for local files
      • (Eric) – cookies have been a problem in other ways (as a result of people wondering why their settings get lost in various places because they don’t understand that cookies stay with the browser and not with the document) – there’s been some discussion on better ways to store TW settings rather than using cookies
        • with Chrome not supporting cookies, now is the time to solve this problem – so I’ve worked up a new plugin which is called the ‘cookie saver’ – it gets into the TW core code that saves cookies, so whenever a cookie is saved to a browser, it automatically saves that cookie into a tiddler – the cookie jar – the values in the tiddler supercede the local browser copies. I call them portable cookies because they travel with the document

• who uses TW
  • looking at the tiddlytools visitor logs, there’s been a signifcant (15%) increase in visitors in the last two weeks
    • this happens every year as students return to school at the end of August/beginning of Sept.
    • this seems to say that the TW user population is predominantly driven by the educational community

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

• General
• Academy

Action Items for 9/10 – 9/17

Academy application – http://academy.unamesa.org/Application** – Please read through and leave feedback for Heather so that she can finalize it. – All

Agenda for call on 9/17

Academy update – Heather

Call recording link: http://sra.sharedrecords.org:8080/SRCDataStore/RESTServlet/5fa1d921d3f788d1e243cb393e0cf86d545edce8.data
These notes also posted at: http://www.projects.unamesa.org/2008-08-27

Agenda

UM Academy – update on call that took place on Aug. 21 - Heather & Paul
UM Academy – update - Heather & Paul
Other updates from associates.

Participants

• Eric
• Marianne
• Heather
• Paul
• Greg
• Barak
• Cory

Apologies

• Saq -meeting with Bruno of BidiX regarding TiddlyHome
• Martin

UM Academy

Heather

• posted additions to the curriculum making it more detailed – http://academy.unamesa.org/Curriculum – (thank you for the additions made by others!)
  • text in red on that page indicates pieces that are still needed – please give feedback and support on these items
• at Saq’s suggestion, we’ll be pushing the actual academy training back one month so we’re now looking at the week of Oct. 13th
• specific benchmarks need to be put on a timeline
  • complete the curriculum
  • add dates to academy calendar (will be done by this Friday)
  • complete recruiting packet
    • text for this has been posted at http://academy.unamesa.org/Curriculum (bottom of page under “UnaMesa Academy Overview”)
  • identify a space to use for the academy
  • identify instructors
  • create an evaluation
    • will want to tie some of the application questions to some of the evaluation questions for measurement/tracking purposes
  • post communication with attendees
    • what support will we have for them after program completion
• (Greg) – I agree that the evaluation and post communication are critical
  • with respect to instructors, especially on more general Web 2.0, I’m considering asking Tapan Parikh or one of the people at UC Berkeley if they would be interested in being a lecturer or participating in some way
    • also, we might be able to match up participants with grad students at UCB who are interested in these issues – this could provide better support, drum up more interest in the academy AND take advantage of some of the knowledge in a university setting
    • I have some contacts at UCB and would want to send them a little background on what we’re doing and it would be very helpful to at least have possible participants at that point if not actual participants so that specific interests could be matched
  • (Heather) – I think that’s a great idea and I’ll write up a description
  • (Paul) – having descriptions & fleshing out the curriculum to identify the specific tools we’ll be teaching are critical next steps leading toward recruiting instructors
    • I suggest identifying key instructors first as opposed to bringing in grad students first so that we’re sure the instructors will be able to do the job well
    • (Heather) – I agree but want to point out that the grad students at UCB teach classes so they would come in knowing how to do that
    • (Greg) – I agree also – one of the reasons I’m thinking of Tapan Parikh is that he’s been working in the field of collecting data on paper and he knows what’s ‘out there’ so he would hopefully be able to give a practical introduction
• (Heather) – as far as tiddlyforms, the only issue not yet addressed is the backup saving
  • the form automatically saves to where your system is set to save downloads (i.e. mine saves downloads to my desktop) – the problem is that I end up with 7 or 8 backup copies
    • need a way to identify specifically where the backup will be saved
    • (Eric) – it can be configured to point to a subdirectory so that all the backups go into a convenient ‘bucket’ – this would be hard coded into one of the tiddlers in the document
      • there’s also a plugin called “less back ups” which makes sure there’s always a backup but not many as ‘usual’ – it keeps the most recent backups and throws away previous backups
• (Heather) – please look through the walk through part on day two – http://academy.unamesa.org/Curriculum – to see if I’ve missed any technology that is needed
  • is there a way to email a single form, such as only the intake form, to a referral agency?
    • (Eric) – there are at least three ways to do this
      • export the tiddler as a tiddler, then it would need to be imported somewhere
      • or export it as a full tiddlywiki doc with just the one form in it
      • or take a snapshot of the displayed tiddler which creates an html file – this way, though, it is not editable
        • (Greg) – the advantage to this last option is that it will open properly in an email viewer whereas a full tiddlywiki won’t
• (Greg) – I’m thinking that one or two days/week, Eric will be onsite doing a ‘design on demand’ sort of process so participants can develop forms specific to their needs – so having a few templates as a starting point is a good idea
• (Barak) – who is the ‘dream’ attendee
  • (Heather) – ideally we’ll have a wide range of people – those with an IT background, and/or a case management background – the idea is to get enough people together who can identify the different needs
    • we wouldn’t want all IT people or all case management people
  • (Greg) – case managers who understand why the forms are used and the purpose of the work and are in the position to say how the process could be made better are probably the ideal as well as being a person who wouldn’t mind getting involved with the computer part at least a little
  • (Eric) – so the “ideal” would be a pair from an organization – one IT person and one case manager
  • (Paul) – that is certainly something we should shoot for but realistically speaking, it may be difficult to get two such people from one organization who can devote 40 hours to the training
    • also, the ideal person is simply someone who is frustrated and is drowning in forms and desires a different way to do things
• (Eric) – I suggest setting up an Academy alumni page on wikispaces where attendees can continue to participate after the class is completed
  • (Barak) – attendees could use the tools they’re being taught DURING the class in order to communicate with each other as part of the curriculum
  • (Paul) – this could also be used during the training for attendees to document what they’re learning
• (Heather) – potential attendees currently are
  • an IT person from Tribal Tanif – they’re short on case mgrs at this time
  • a program staff person from American Indian Child Resource Center – this person understands what the paperwork requirements are as well as the programming requirements
  • I’m hoping to also get someone from the Casey Foundation so we have someone who needs the information collaboration piece
    • (Greg) – I’m a little wary of having someone who is not directly responsible for interacting with clients because they won’t have a work flow process that they’re responsible for participating in
  • (Greg) – let’s set up a time in September to get together with them and Eric to discuss what they’re using now for their databases and we might be able to suggest something more appropriate before the pilot program starts
  • (Paul) – we should ask attendees to give us ahead of time (as part of the application) a form that they use to help us prepare for their specific needs ahead of time

Additional Items

Saq

• I may be unable to join the call today as I am meeting with Bruno
  (BidiX) to discuss some of the work he has been doing on TiddlyHome,
  which might offer some promise for the problems we are facing in
  managing multiple forms (tiddlywikis).
• We had 10 attendees at the TiddlyParis get together on Monday night and not
  only was it nice to meet many of the community members face to face,
  but we also had some interesting discussions that I will report upon
  at a more opportune time.

Greg

• I spoke with Andreas and I’m hoping we’ll get SRs moved over to EC2, including the name servers, this week
  • tiddlywiki may take a little more time because it’s a larger community
• I’d like to get together with Barak within the next few weeks on the forms demo site he put up to see if we can use the pilot academy course as a first instance of building out a workable site

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

• General
• Academy

Action Items for 8/27 – 9/3

UM Academy – read through the updated curriculum page at http://academy.unamesa.org/Curriculumand give feedback on anything and everything to Heather - All

Forms site - let Greg know when you’ll be available to discuss your site and using the Academy pilot course as a first instance of building out a workable site – Barak

Agenda for call on 9/3

UM Academy – update - Heather
MORE project update - Saq
Wikispaces update – Saq
TiddlyParis update – Saq
BidiX update – Saq
Dr. in Scotland update – Saq
Tiddlywiki/wikispaces technical issues – Saq & Martin

Call recording link: http://sra.sharedrecords.org:8080/SRCDataStore/RESTServlet/40c6b90c0888b1872c5b34281669af4fa0461ca3.data
These notes also posted at: http://www.projects.unamesa.org/2008-08-20

Agenda

Academy update – Heather
Update on move to EC2 – Andreas
TiddlyParis community get together – Saq
Other updates from associates.

Participants

• Marianne
• Saq
• Eric
• Greg
• Cory
• Martin

Apologies

• Paul – can attend call every other week
• Heather

MORE

Saq

• spoke with Yousuf who has been struggling with health problems
  • I have a detailed report from him which I’ll put on the wiki for those interested
• BVC project (classes being broadcast for the open university)
  • they’re over half way through
  • the SMS participation hasn’t been as high as they’d liked but this is mostly because the classes are broadcast at 7:30am and not many students are able to participate at that time
  • they’re now deploying DVDs of the lessons plus DVD players to the various Bangladesh Open University centers – this will be completed by the end of the month
  • by end of Aug, all the tutorial centers will have all the lessons available on DVD
    • this will also provide an opportunity for SoftEd to interview the students and get feedback on how well the systems are working for them, what could be improved and what is missing
• Discussed with Yousuf the programming work that needs to be done and who should do it
  • the person who trained the two programmers who just left SoftEd will be returning to work fulltime plus there are two others working part time
  • by the end of Aug we’ll turn requirements into specifications to be worked on
  • we’ll be using mostly TW
• Discussed licensing with Yousuf and he’s happy to open source all the software as long as they can run their own service and generate a revenue stream off of that
• SoftEd’s contract with UM has expired
• (Greg) – at the end of the month, after the specifications are worked out, I’ll talk with Yousuf about the contract

Wikispaces

Saq

• had an email from Adam recently
  • he hasn’t had a chance to take a close look at the prototype but he’s happy with what he’s seen
  • no feedback yet on the few API requirements
• Martin will continue the work that Eric has done on the discussions since Martin is more familiar with the synchronization
• If all goes well, Andrew Lister will be using the wikispaces prototype iin his class in the second week of September
  • he would like to blog about his experience (if he has time), which would be great but it raises the issue that we still don’t have a name for this prototype
    • Adam from wikispaces has expressed concern over this – he doesn’t want to tie in the wikispaces brand name too much right now
    • will we be offering this to wikispaces as something they can market or brand as their product?
    • (Greg) – I think there’s no problem if they want to offer it as something for others to use

UM Academy

Heather

EC2

Saq

• I had a short email conversation with Andreas
  • he hasn’t had the time to move over all the tiddlywiki.org infrastructure and he’s hoping someone from the community would have the time
    • he’ll speak with Fred at Osmosoft to see if they can lend a hand to complete that transition

TiddlyParis

Saq

• I’m going to be in Paris for a week starting this Friday
• on Tues., Aug. 26th, I’ve arranged a TW community get together
  • expecting 8 people so far, including some of the better known members of the community
  • (Martin) – I think Simon and Phil from Osmosoft are planning to go

Mobile Data Collection

Jon

• we’ve had two full time developers working on it for a couple months but will be transitioning off the project this Friday as their consortium looks for new funding
• the device can currently work on most nokia phones that are probably $100 and above
  • it takes an x form which is a standard xml protocol for web forms, letting you put it on a phone, fill it out and submit it back to some url that can consume that
  • there’s a tool called ‘linesurvey’ that the group in S. Africa has been working on making it forms compatible so that it can talk with the Java Rosa client – it will be piloted this month
• technical discussion from minutes 25 to 30

Additional Items

Saq

• google is arranging a teacher’s academy. where they’re training teachers to use google apps in an educational setting and offering a certification
  • there’s an application process
  • that’s the sort of path I’d like for the UM Academy to eventually take
  • I sent a link to Paul & Heather – http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html
  • I’m talking to some educators who have applied to go to that academy and if they attend they’ve promised to give detailed feedback on what the experience was like
• I’ve been talking to Barak about how we can better market TW to get more people using it and in different settings
  • we’ll have a phone call in a couple weeks to discuss that and will tentatively meet in person a month after that in Spain
  • one of the barriers I’ve seen is that it’s been marketed as a personal notebook so people fail to see that it’s actually a platform that can be used to build different kinds of applications
    • even those who are technically skilled find it difficult because the core code hasn’t been documented or explained in a way that makes it easy to get started with
      • I’ve started on a three part introduction to programming with TW that will hopefully serve as a good primer and, also, lower the barrier of adoption by people who ARE technically skilled
        • part 1 – introduce some of the basic concepts to people who are not fluent in programming, which is where I started
        • part 2 – introduce some of the basic TW concepts
        • part 3 – will build on that
        • (Eric) – I’ve got some content up on TiddlyTools as a series of slides that you might want to check out
          • it’s basic right now but I plan to expand it into laying out all the different parts of the internals of TW in terms of what to do to create a macro or a command – also style sheets vs templates etc.
• a doctor in Scotland (Roger) set up a wiki on our UM private label – http://tiddlytumbles.projects.unamesa.org/
  • on it he’s shared a TW he’s built using a lot of Eric’s plug ins
  • he’s using this to share medical records
  • he’s detailed his work and why he’s doing it
  • he’s interested in working with UM if possible
  • this was a pleasant surprise to see that he took the effort to set up, the wiki, detail all the work and share it with us – this confirms that setting up our website as a wiki was a good idea
  • there’s some significant overlap with some of the work that we’re doing in the areas of SRs and ServiceLink in terms of sharing medical records, but also with the academy in terms of forms
• (Greg) – as you’re talking with Andrew Lister, Roger and Yousuf, please put together a list of the data collection and whether it’s being done on paper, on a website, through TW or through mobile so that we can start to get a picture of where the date is flowing into the organizations that we’re working with – that will give us an idea of the most important places to start with the forms work

Cory

• I was in Zambia for the past month
• still working on the health record project
  • we’re slowly rolling out the next version to the country, which is a technical challenge
  • we’re doing most of the framework
  • the ‘in country’ programmers are doing the UI and report stuff and handling deployments entirely
    • there are about 250 deployments – mostly through partner organizations

Greg

• I was talking with Jon last week about OpenRosa and support for that which we’ll hopefully be following up on soon
  • the SMS data is being collected with the JavaRosa program
• we’ll be having a call regarding the UM Academy tomorrow at 10am PDT

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

• General
• Academy

Action Items for 8/20 – 8/27

Agenda for call on 8/27

UM Academy – update on call that took place on Aug. 21 - Heather & Paul
UM Academy – update - Heather & Paul
MORE project update - Saq
Wikispaces update – Saq