Dgroups2 – milestones and progress

Here again is the dgroups interface, larger this time, because at least one reader found the previous screen dump too small. As you can see a number of people have continued to test the platform and make comments on features as they are added. As you would expect, people’s reactions are mixed. There are features which are seen as an improvement on dgroups 1 while others  are generating questions. All the comments have been logged – using the system itself – and will be reviewed.  Thanks again to all those who are putting in their time and patiently learning how things work.

Today, however, we reached a significant milestone. WA Research has completed the major part of the development they planned to meet the criteria set out in the contract. This means two things:

1. The core migration team has started more systematic testing of the platform, confirming what works and identifying issues to be looked at. We’ll keep you posted on progress.
2. We need to plan for an increase in the numbers of people – and groups – who are exploring and testing the new system. These preparations need to start with the people who create groups – called coordinators in dgroups 2.  We will be arranging briefing and discussion meetings with those people (called creators in dgroups 1) next week.

Feels a bit like Christmas, really: starting to wonder what’s going to be delivered.

Pete Cranston

Dgroups 2 – What Will be Different?

Simone, the first to give a comment, speaks for many of us: what will be different? Our aim with this blog is to introduce you gently to the changes and more importantly, to get your feedback on the things with the current platform that gave you trouble the most and what you liked the most. 

Here are a few notable changes you’ll see with Dgroups 2.0 platform; a short list for now, with more detailed blog posts to follow soon:

• You can change your email address whenever you feel like!
• Hierarchical groups – any group can have as many sub-groups as needed to support hierarchical nature of your collaboration.
• Stronger focus on self-service – much more things to pass on to members and admins: invitation emails to let new members fill their own profiles; online requests for group creation …
• Some terminology changes: creators will become coordinators to better reflect their role.
• Great search engine with support for faceted filtering.
• Tighter integration between email and web – in addition to mailing lists we’re used to, there are other things you can get email from and email to (and rss as well).
• Full support and product management – we intend to provide first- and second-level support for everyone - depending on organization’s and coordinator’s policy, of course.
• We’re aiming for 99.99% uptime.
• Your data will move to Switzerland, to a secure hosting center approved by the Swiss Federal Banking Commission.

Our strategy for the migration is to keep your ability to do things the same as before and remove as many limitations as possible. Dgroups 2.0 is first about letting you conduct your Development through dialogue in a smooth manner and get technology out of the way as much as possible.

Dgroups2 progress and plans

We are off!

This blog is the product of a meeting last week in The Hague. It brought together four members of the core project team – Damir Simunic (WA Research – the company selected to deliver dgroups 2.0), Hapee De Groot (Hivos), Mark Hammersley (leading on Communications, amongst other things) and Pete Cranston (Migration Project Manager), as well as Peter Ballantyne (Dgroups coordinator) and Christian Kreutz (Dgroups Executive Committee member from IICD).

After looking at the data from Damir’s initial analysis we outlined principles, phase plans and milestones for the next six months.

We agreed four basic principles:

• All groups, together with their users, will be offered the opportunity to migrate to the new system
• Migration will be organised around clusters of groups, organised by creators or members of the dgroups partnership associated with the group
• We aim to deliver a managed, exponentially increasing migration process
• We will communicate actions and progress, regularly, through as many channels as appropriate

Phases

Learning and Evolving: from now until the end of October, WA Research is building the first prototype application. Starting with the core team, we will be inviting some of the people who have expressed interest in testing to work with us in shaping that platform

Beta Testing: from 1st November for about 6 weeks, we will invite more people and their groups to participate in beta testing the platform. There will still be lots of opportunities in this period to help shape the final product.

Switch over: sometime in late December, the new platform will be complete and live – and some groups who have been part of the beta testing will operate completely in the new environment.

Migration: Late December into January 2009 – the majority of groups will migrate in this period

Completion and Decomissioning: during February, any remaining groups will be migrated to the new platform, and the orginal platform will be retired – to survive perhaps in the wayback machine.

If you have any queries or suggestions, please either write to me (pc AT euforic.org) or leave a comment here in this blog.

Dgroups 2.0: Build and Migration

The Dgroups Executive Committee agreed a contract with WA research to build the next version of Dgroups. The contract was signed last week, Thursday.

WA Research SA has been in operation since January, 2002, with a mission to build and support collaborative solutions for the international development sector. Customers include the World Health
Organisation, the United Nations Staff College, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, MD, and a number of other international and non profit
organizations.

WA have developed a collaboration platform called ECS. It was originally funded by the WHO and Implementing Best Practices (IBP) consortium, which includes more than 20 organisations involved in
reproductive public health (http://www.ibpinitiative.org). ECS is used by more than 25.000 active users and is rapidly growing. WA Research approach is summarised at http://edgeof.net/.

This is a MAJOR milestone for Dgroups – we have been planning this next step for a long time now.

If all goes to plan, we should have the new platform ready by the end of the year, with the migration complete in February.

We recognize that we have much to do in a short time-frame. It will also lead to some changes in the way Dgroups operates. We aim to make the transition as smooth as possible, and we count on your help in this.

To anticipate any problems and to minimize disruption, we are putting together a migration team to oversee – and communicate – the process and all the various steps; I am sure you will here from them very soon with more details, and requests to help beta test the new service.