Earlier today, members of the Dgroups Partnership completed their meeting in The Hague. It was followed by a brief meeting of the new Board. For the first time, members could participate virtually in some parts of the discussions, opening a new chapter for Dgroups.
New Helvetas Board member Riff Fullan reflects on the discussions:
Yesterday’s meeting was in plenary and provided an opportunity for participants to re-connect, to reflect on past progress (see Peter Ballantyne’s report), and to explore different future directions and priorities for Dgroups.
Today, participants broke into groups to discuss and set short-term priorities for issues clustered around ‘the partnership’ and ‘the platform.’
SDC’s Patrick Kalas reflects on the first day:
So, what are some of the things that Dgroups users expect to see in coming weeks and months?
Today in The Hague, members of the Dgroups Partnership elected a new Board to guide the Partnership in the coming years. The organizations elected were:
Earlier this month the Dgroups Foundation was established in the Netherlands. After early years incubated by Bellanet/IDRC as a project, Dgroups members decided that a legal entity was needed at the heart of the partnership.
The intention is to keep the Foundation small and smart: It will have a Board elected from members of the partnership. More operational activities like platform hosting, support, and communication among the members will be contracted to others.
The next meeting of the Dgroups partnership is in April 2009 where some important further governance and strategic decisions will be taken.
Organizations interested in joining Dgroups can find more information online. We welcome any non-governmental, governmental and inter-governmental bodies and any other type of organization that shares the objectives of the Foundation.
On February 13th, we ‘closed’ the original Dgroups installation hosted in Canada – switching to the new platform. By February 20th, all the data was fully migrated to Switzerland.
How many made the migration?
Our colleagues at WA research report: “As of today we have 122,187 users registered in 2,227 ‘active’ and 440 ‘archived’ Dgroups (however, some 17,707 of these do not seem to belong to any of the migrated groups, and we know that some email accounts are no longer active).
Every day we receive between 1,800 and 3,200 messages for dgroups.org, and send out between 50 and 90,000 to members.
So, despite a large cleanup of Dgroups late in 2008, the total graphs continue their generaly upward trend – this may change however after we further review and remove inactive email accounts.
This week, Maarten Boers and Peter Ballantyne were in Switzerland to meet with WA Research on the status of the Dgroups migration process. We also met with Dgroups members Helvetas and Swiss Development Cooperation.
Helvetas has so far been gradually introducing and using Dgroups into its activities. It also acts as sponsor for the very active KM4dev Dgroup – where people discuss and share knowledge sharing and knowledge management experiences in the development sector.
In its earlier days within Bellanet, SDC provided support for the platform – helping to ensure it would be both a tool providing specific services as well as a wider common good for the development community to benefit from. SDC colleagues indicated that they intend to continue their membership of Dgroups, particularly making use of it to facilitate communication and exchange in their thematic networks. They indicated they might consider providing additional funds to support the further development of the platform and its outreach into communities in developing countries.
View our presentation to SDC colleagues:
On April 15 and 16, members of the Dgroups partnership will meet in The Hague to review progress and plans.
Here at Euforic, we have had a chance to participate in the ‘beta’ testing of the new Dgroups platform.
As a heavy and long-time Dgroups user, Dgroups creator, and overall Dgroups coordinator, I have many interests in the new platform.
I was immediately very reassured by the reliable email system in the new ‘D2′ … in the past months, not being sure that messages would pass through ‘D1′was a continual worry, and a source of many many frustrated email messages from around the world. Good job D2!
One change I have noticed is that I seem to use the web much more to manage my D2 groups that I did on D1. Since email is at the heart of Dgroups, I hope this is not something permanent.
Logging on to D2 today, I was immediately struck by the many new arrivals on the new platform. The big migration of groups has begun. It feels a little bit like what it must have felt to be on Ellis Island in New York all those years ago! I look forward to meet up again with groups from the old platform, connecting and re-connecting.
One of my major concerns is to ensure that the new platform helps and encourages us migrant groups to meet up again, and not be lost forever in closed ‘communities.’ The current web interface certainly gives me a full screen of information, we need to ensure that basic information on all groups is open and that we do not encourage people to close themselves off. They can go to Google for that!
The final phase of the migration to the new Dgroups platform (Dgroups 2) from the old platform (Dgroups 1) has begun this week. This post summarises progress and plans.
No new Groups on Dgroups 1
The people who create Dgroups (known helpfully as creators) have been asked not to create any more on the old platform, Dgroups 1. It will also be helpful if activity can be reduced during the next two weeks, although we completely recognise that may not be possible for business reasons. If this causes any difficulties please get back to us in the migration team (by commenting on this blog).
MIGRATION
The testing phase of the new platform is finished. Thanks very much to those of you who participated in that testing phase. The comments you made have been recorded.
The new software platform is stable. Email is being delivered and group management functions are available on the web interface. Basic administration functions through email are in the final stages of completion
All active groups will be migrated next week (the week beginning 2nd February). ‘Closed’ groups will be migrated later, as read-only.
As you would expect, there are differences in the way that the new system operates from Dgroups 1. We are working on simple support documentation which will be available by the end of this week.
The new supplier, WA Research, is still working on the some areas of functionality, notably the web interface, and there are some changes already in the pipeline. However, the absolute priority is the migration and it will be important to allow both the teams and users to get used to the new environment and review it as a whole before there are major changes.
Technical Support: Users Talk to Your Administrator, and Administrators Talk to Your Dgroups Creator
The first line of support for Dgroups users is the Dgroup’s administrator, while administrators can call on their Dgroups creator for support. This pattern will continue in Dgroups and it is a great way to spread knowledge about how to use the new system effectively.
Patience please !
Migrations such as this are extremely difficult: mistakes will happen. The team in general and WA Research in particular are working long, long hours. The pressure will ease a little when the main part of the migration is complete, which will be during February and at that stage people will have more time to deal with any non-urgent queries.
It is now about four months since DGroups Partner organisations started to prepare their groups for migration to the new platform, and a lot of “house keeping” has been done since then. Thanks to your hard work, most organisations and most groups are now ready. Overall, 67% of all groups on the original DGroups server have been confirmed. It is likely that many of the remainder are inactive. Is your group ready to migrate?
If the person responsible for coordinating DGroups at the Partner organisation which supports your group has not yet contacted you then please ensure that they know you are ready. To find up to date contact details click on “Contacts” above.
On Tuesday 16th December Dgroups Executive Committee accepted our recomendation that the new platform is sufficiently developed for us to begin the migration process. We will be publishing more details this week and next on how the migration will take place. In the meantime, the work of tidying up group ownership is almost complete. The final step before we begin migration is some preparatory technical work with Igloo which we hope to complete by early next week.
(Note: this copy of an Escher print can be found all over the Internet but if there is an objection on copyright grounds to my posting it I will remove it)
Posted by peterballantyne 
Posted by peterballantyne 
Posted by euforic 
On Tuesday 16th December Dgroups Executive Committee accepted our recomendation that the new platform is sufficiently developed for us to begin the migration process. We will be publishing more details this week and next on how the migration will take place. In the meantime, the work of tidying up group ownership is almost complete. The final step before we begin migration is some preparatory technical work with Igloo which we hope to complete by early next week.
