that's August gone!

The last few weeks have been full of EGRET-related activity, although it has not all occurred under an EGRET banner. We've brainstormed social applications for academia (some of which are potential EGRET-related ideas) in a couple of forums. I somewhat belatedly sent off all the project planning documentation. I've also had some useful conversations about ways to incentivise adoption of social applications, and how to get over the usual initial barriers when there are only a handful of users to network with.

With Talks.cam helpdesk and jira bug-tracking set up, and Talks.cam hosted on our institutional servers here at CARET, we are making progress with the EGRET plan. We've had Talks.cam helpdesk tickets coming in, and it's been interesting to start to figure out both how to handle these in the short term and how to extend our helpdesk offering through the project.

Next week, we have one of the original Talks.cam authors coming in to train the team up on the codebase and architecture. We are all looking forward to learning new things, both about the code, and how to support users. Talks.cam is written in Ruby and this will be a new language for most of us here; I foresee O'Reilly Ruby and Rails books in our futures!

It's been hard to schedule sessions to learn about the existing system, as the original people have moved on to new things and have less time; this is one point I'll be bearing in mind for the institutionalisation study.

So, as usual for these early days, a lot of ideas-generation, some actual progress, but not many concrete outputs yet.