And we're off again

[Sara Farmer]

Hello everyone!

My apologies for the hiatus in the GlobalPulse platform build: in the
past few months, there's been a lot of analysis-watching and decision-
making about what the platform is useful for, how to connect it to a
bunch of related systems (CRMA and CIMS being just two of these) and
which languages, database types and underlying architectures to use.

Also my apologies for there not being a flurry of emails related to
the above in this googlegroup - truth is, we've been so much up to our
eyeballs setting the New York lab up that handling more ideas would
have completely overwhelmed us.

But we're here now, we have a much clearer idea of what's needed, and
we have a good place to start in the global-pulse github (https://
github.com/global-pulse). Right now, there are 3 projects in there,
with designs in each project's wikis:

* Oliver. This is the prototype for the GP platform (the latest
version of the code is in my fork at https://github.com/bodacea/oliver,
but we're going to fix that soon). Oliver's basic at the moment, but
it's a start. The plan is to spend May building Oliver into a useful
prototype for each of the main groups connected to it - that's the in-
country GP labs who are tracking vulnerabilities, the responders who
need an in-country set of crisismapping tools and the resident
coordinators trying to link this work to the excellent project and
risk based maps from the CRMA tool.

* Hunchshare. This is the tool that analysts can use to share their
'hunches' about emerging vulnerabilities and crises. The first
month's user interface design for this tool will start in the middle
of May, and we're planning to devote June to building the backend to
support it.

* Spine. Remember that bit where we were thinking about how the Global
Pulse platform needed to work with other related systems (CRMA, CIMS
etc)? Whether we build Spine or not, we need a design that shows
exactly how these tools work together as a system (or, rather, as a
system of systems). This is where we're putting that design.

* There will also be other tools needed as part of the toolset, but
the Workspace Capabilities googlegroup is a more natural home for
those other discussions.

So. Who's in? The first designs are up (but need completing), the
first code is up (but needs completing: and thank you so much, Graham,
for starting this well), and the first discussions about what all the
groups above need and can have are still happening and still fresh.
* If you want to help with the code, fork it and play (but please
email here if you're making any huge design decisions)
* If you want to help with the designs, they're in the project wikis
(e.g. for Oliver, that's https://github.com/global-pulse/oliver/wiki)
* If you want to help with the discussions about needs and uses, then
that's part of what these googlegroups are for.

This is your chance to help build something that's not just useful for
us, but can be useful for a whole bunch of other communities too.

The hashtag for short comments and updates is #gpbuild. I haven't
worked out yet how that translates into Quora, but I'm sure someone on
this list will know how to do it.

Onwards!



Sj.