Current implementation efforts

[Erik Wright]

Hi,

I guess at the moment Jennifer is actively doing some implementation
work on the Hospitality and Expenses project.

I wonder if it is worth it for interested parties to get together for
a brainstorm on long-term architecture for the VG systems? In
particular, I am not sure that the best approach is to design lots of
small independent systems for parsing different sites, each doing a
direct load from a source site and directly inputting the data into a
database.

In the medium term I see at least the following issues as requiring
attention:

(1) because we are fundamentally dealing with services and formats
that we don't control I believe we need to carefully design our
systems to separate the data input from all of the other aspects;

(2) because there will be many cross-cutting concerns affecting all of
the eventual services VG sponsors (i.e. scheduling, data conversion,
syndication, annotation, tagging, visualization, discussion, etc.) we
will reduce our "time-to-market" for individual services and stretch
our donor dollars further if we invest in establishing shared
implementations of these concerns.

Of course it might still be expedient to do the simplest thing
possible for the pilot projects (in order to attract attention and
funding) but having a roadmap is the first step in a longer
development process.

I will be happy to host such a session at my offices on St Laurent at
Mont-Royal.

Cheers,

Erik

[Don Kelly]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 4:26 PM, Erik Wright <er...@erikwright.com> wrote:
>
> I will be happy to host such a session at my offices on St Laurent at
> Mont-Royal.
>

For those of use in other jurisdictions (Ottawa, in my case), would
the results from this this be posted anywhere?

Don/

--
karfai [AT] gmail.com
http://www.strangeware.ca
http://blog.strangeware.ca

[Jennifer Bell]

Actually, most of the people in this group right now are from
different cities... with Ottawa, Montreal, and Calgary being the most
represented, as far as I know.

There's also the forum VisibleGovernment Discuss, which is more about
general comments on what VisibleGovernment general plans and process,
that I forgot to tell Erik about. (Sorry, Erik!) Everyone here is
also welcome there - depending on what you're interested in. The link
to that group is here:

http://groups.google.com/group/visiblegovernment-discuss

Thanks for offering your offices for planning meetings. I'm likely
going to hold you to that. :-) And yes, there should be a general
policy brainstorming. I'll post some of my current ideas to the
discuss group shortly.

Yes, the will be a standardized way of sharing meeting minutes... with
the caveat that if specific people are discussed that are not on the
VisibleGovnerment.ca board or committee or at the meeting, their names
will be struck to protect their privacy.

Note: for those people on the group who are unfamiliar with Google
Groups, you can always change your settings to 'digest' to receive a
single email summary of activity per day.

Jennifer

On Jul 28, 5:57 pm, "Don Kelly" <kar...@gmail.com> wrote: