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some 17,707 of these do not seem to belong to any of the migrated groups, and we know that some email accounts are no longer active).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.

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!

So far so good …

Peter Ballantyne

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

1. 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.
2. 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
3. All active groups will be migrated next week (the week beginning 2nd February). ‘Closed’ groups will be migrated later, as read-only.
4. 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.
5. 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 !

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.

Mark Hammersley

(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)

Pete Cranston

A quick end of the week post to record progress on a significant milestone, in two ways.

1. The first group from Dgroups 1 was migrated across to the new platform at the end of last week. Hapee de Groot of Hivos, for it is a group that he manages, has been testing it with his colleagues. While there are some issues to be looked at, as you would expect, the important thing is that all the elements of the group came  across as planned: discussions, documents, members and their profiles- including passwords – were there when the group was opened. Great work, WA Research, and a necessary step in preparing for migration.
2. Saskia Harmsen of IICD had the bright idea of using a training workshop she was running in Burkina Faso as a place to both test and introduce Dgroups 2 in French. The result is at the top of this page. WA responded quickly, both to open the group and then – overnight ! – to amend and improve the French translations, following feedback. Saskia reported that, “the workshop participants and first users of the itrainers-fr group were really enthusiastic about the new platform”.  A big thanks to Saskia and the training workshop participants for their very valuable feedback!

We have begun the process of planning migration in more detail, and will be reporting on that early next week.

(NOTE:the Spanish and Portuguese translations are being worked on at the moment. )

Pete Cranston

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

Alpha phase – at present we are making sure the Dgroups 2 platform allows one to perform all activities one is used to. Dgroups is all about email: consequently most of our work now is about tuning the new platform to offer what is needed to continue smooth operation mailing list operation.

This is purely software development and testing operation: we work against a list of requirements for the new platform making sure we cover all aspects of important functionality of the existing one. The work is divided in three functional areas: email, web user interface, and user profile features.

Beta test – as soon as we complete all the major features, we’ll open up the platform for an increasing number of existing Dgroups users to look around, try new things, see how their groups will look like.

At this stage, the platform will have all major functions available, but those will be rough around the edges. We’ll continue polishing and working as you look around. We’ll all communicate a lot about what you like or not and whether we’re missing something crucial that the majority of you were able to do with the old system. During this period, we’ll provide you with a copy of your data from the live Dgroups site, but only to look at – you will still use the existing live site to run your groups.

If you are feeling good about what you see and are tolerant towards technology, go ahead and create a few new groups using the new platform. Sure, it won’t be 100% finished, yet it won’t be crashing either.

Transition – when we’re sure it all works well, we’ll ask you not to create new groups on the existing live site, but to use the new one. Existing groups might still function on the old site for a while, but all new stuff goes through Dgroups 2. At this stage, we’ll have full support in place, all email messages will pass through the new platform and continue to the old one – thus the new one will be a mirror of whatever is going on with the current platform.

We want to give you some time to check the new platform and look around, learn the basics without pressure – your important groups will continue to run on the existing platform you already know so well.

Switch – once you get to know enough of the new platform to send and receive messages, approve new members, add resources, …, we’ll just flip the switch and immediately the new platform will start sending messages instead of the old one. All messages will already be there, we’ll copy all resources in advance. No downtime.

The Great Beyond – on February 20, 2009, we’ll shut down the old Dgroups system forever. That day on, we’ll work hard on new and exciting things to make Dgroups the best place on the Internet for international development community to conduct their dialogue.

So our priority has been to fully understand the reality of groups – how many are currently active, how many are dormant (not currently active but likely to be in the future) and how many should have been closed but weren’t? I have to confess here, for example, that when I was at OneWorld several groups were started for projects I was involved in that shouldn’t be still be there – but still are because I didn’t make sure they were closed. There is also the important issue of what we are calling ‘orphan groups’, groups that don’t currently connect to a current member of the dgroups partnership. Bellanet, for example, set up lots of groups. Those ‘owned’ by IDRC transferred out of dgroups to an IDRC server but lots of groups, including some large active ones, aren’t currently linked to a member.

We are clear that all groups that want to migrate to the new dgroups will have the opportunity to do so which is why we are spending a lot of time at the moment sorting out these issues. We have started the process by contacting the creators of dgroups, who are working through the lists at the moment.

We are also keen to re-activate the peer-support groups that were busy in the past but have been less so recently. Peer-support is an important way to share knowledge and spread limited resources between larger and smaller communities. We have contacted all the listed administrators: we are placing bets on how many bounces there are.

Meanwhile, we have also been focusing on the email system, making sure the new platform can support the email functions that have always been – and will continue to be – a central part of dgroups. The four of us in the migration team are experimenting with a trial environment at the moment and, as planned, we will invite a small number of people to join us over the next couple of weeks.

Pete Cranston

Our migration team is using this hierarchy to simplify communication. Our top-level group, ‘Migration to D2’ deals with general communication around migration. This group also serves as the entry point for all people we’re involving in the work around the migration process. Yet, we have some specialized topics, like data analysis, observations on the behavior of the new platforms, meeting coordination, and similar. For these specific topics that include only a subset of people involved, it makes sense to treat them separately. This is where the hierarchy comes in: we dedicated a sub-group for each of the specialized topics.

The interesting part is how the platform deals with hierarchy membership: all members of the sub-groups are always members of their parent groups, all the way to the top. If we invite someone to a sub-group, that someone is automatically a member of the parent groups (but not the sibling groups). Membership always propagates upwards. 

Conversely, an administrator of a group is automatically administrator of all sub-groups. Of course, one can assign a new administrator of a subgroup, who in turn can administer all sub-groups of that group, but is only a member of all parents. 🙂 Quite a mouthful to say, yet simplifies user management greatly.

There is no limit how many levels of sub-groups one wants to create, except maybe in practicality of writing an URL that is 1000+ characters long. Each group still gets its own mailing list and a document library, and outside of the URL and membership rules, it behaves like a top-level group.