Here are a few notable changes you’ll see with Dgroups 2.0 platform; a short list for now, with more detailed blog posts to follow soon:

• You can change your email address whenever you feel like!
• Hierarchical groups – any group can have as many sub-groups as needed to support hierarchical nature of your collaboration.
• Stronger focus on self-service – much more things to pass on to members and admins: invitation emails to let new members fill their own profiles; online requests for group creation …
• Some terminology changes: creators will become coordinators to better reflect their role.
• Great search engine with support for faceted filtering.
• Tighter integration between email and web – in addition to mailing lists we’re used to, there are other things you can get email from and email to (and rss as well).
• Full support and product management – we intend to provide first- and second-level support for everyone – depending on organization’s and coordinator’s policy, of course.
• We’re aiming for 99.99% uptime.
• Your data will move to Switzerland, to a secure hosting center approved by the Swiss Federal Banking Commission.

Our strategy for the migration is to keep your ability to do things the same as before and remove as many limitations as possible. Dgroups 2.0 is first about letting you conduct your Development through dialogue in a smooth manner and get technology out of the way as much as possible.

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.