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.