Movement

Monday morning included a meeting with my supervisor, the group manager, the director, and the two developers. We settled on the facets or types of data we will need for each item in the portal. We agreed to some formats and some of the controlled vocabulary. We have a pretty good idea of what the final product will be like.

The whiteboard.

The facets, the data that will be input with each item, includes a text title and description, plus year, campus, discipline, category (of technology or initiative), people (involved in the project), tags (any pertinent metadata that isn't covered in the other fields), and media (an image to represent the project and a URL to the project page).

At this point, much of the project turns over to the developers. They are researching database needs and a few other odds and ends. I will write up some documentation: description of the schema and the structure of the site. There will be two aspects: the input system and the public facing system.

I need to get documentation to them by the end of Friday before spring break begins. During the week that I am off, hopefully they will be able to get a start on the development side of things. The timing of spring break is actually working out well.

After spring break, I do have a few odds and ends I can work on while the project is in the development phase, but I'm coming to kind of a pause point. Once they have some of the development done, I should be able to begin some UX testing. We'll need to "seed" the new portal, so testing the input system first makes sense (because then we can start entering projects).

I'm not sure how much of the seeding I'll need to do. I can possibly come up with some recommendations for the project pages (the portal won't actually host the projects, just be a portal to access them; staff will have to create project pages on their personal sites).

Takeaway this time: There's an ebb and flow on projects. Working with a team, there are times when you're busy and the project is sitting in your hands, and others might be waiting on you. And then there are times when the project is in someone else's hands and you're waiting for your next steps. Luckily I have some loose ends I can tie up in the meantime (after spring break).