The August Project Meeting

We had our August meeting this week. Most of the actions from the last meeting have been done. Hamza has checked the copyright issues with NING and everything seems to be OK and we have decided to pay NING to remove the adverts from the pages. We had quite a discussion on ways of getting people involved in the Community of Practice and when to really push it. We still think Sept would be a good time though it may be a good idea to hold some sort of face-to-face event in October to advertise the project within the University. Again the issue arose of sharing pre-validated documents. Whether to allow full access for people to compare before and after documents against how introducing an element of "This is what not to do", was ethically sound and what would it do to the positive feel of a community!

We finished the meeting will us all tasked to think about the requirements of people searching through the validations and to think of some use cases. Ben Sam & Chris are meeting up later in the week to look into descriptions with the validation documents that Chris and his colleagues currently store in a database.

I had been pondering over the question of how to attract the more experienced staff members to join the community. So at the end of last week I went to see the head of our Quality Improvement service, (essentially the powers that be when it comes to validation). She is part of the project steering group and is happy to for us to let the community know that they will have an influence on policy and process.

This week I also had meeting with a senior member of the SURF group and from our faculty of Computing & Engineering. A common theme is emerging from these meetings around support for panels and consistencies between faculties. It would seem that for the project to succeed then in order to develop more intelligent systems for validations we may need to put the emphasis on support. I am hoping to talk to some of the faculty administrative staff see how their approach differs cross-faculty.

Other things have arisen from the meetings. It was interesting how the wider University agenda affects the validations over time for example the new legislation on disabilities in 2005 meant questions about accessiblity became very prevalent. If (as I suggested may happen) panels were recommended to make more commendations would advice or guidance be available? Something I hadn't realised that the SURF Foundation degrees that involve Work-Based-Learning, often invite employers to validation events.

So lots to think about and lots to do so I'm off to the Maldives to lie on a beach and think about it. I wish!