Meeting Notes for 12 November 2008 CI computer accounts New Hire QuarkNet Forums Discussion on Content from Wiki Pages Content Management Systems

Meeting Notes for 12 November 2008

Present: Mihael, Eric
Absent: Liz, Tom J., Bob, Tom L., Mike W., Randy, Kris, Joao, Dan K.

CI computer accounts

Eric reports that he's finally got his access restored to the ANL login servers. (This was not required to get to the cluster because he can go directly via www13.) But his account is still disabled at the CI. He's written both to the head of the support group and to support generally, but with no response. Mihael says he's also mentioned this to them. The head of the group has just had a baby, so he may be busy, and they may also be busy due to preparations for SC08. Eric can do other things, but he needs the account turned back on to be able to write to SVN, to test whether we can use the Trac ticket system, and to work on submitting LIGO tasks to Swift on Teraport. Hopefully this will be resolved after SC08.

New Hire

Mihael and Mike interviewed several candidates on Friday, and one of them seemed especially interesting. Mihael said he expected we'd make an offer, if that has not been done already. But the candidate also had interviews elsewhere, so don't get your hopes up.

QuarkNet Forums

Eric reports that Marge has asked him to set up a site for QuarkNet with forums, RSS news, and a wiki, to tie together a widely distributed collection of wiki and blog sites being set up all over the net. This is to be separate from I2U2, but of course there may be some overlap via the e-Lab. Eric is setting this up on www10, basically by copying the prototype site on www13 and then altering it to have the QuarkNet look, and to have separate sections for various QuarkNet factions (though that may not be the right word for it). Building the server software also helps I2U2, as it needed to be done anyway on www12 for the test server. Design decisions for this site will probably also help us with design of the ELabs portal.

Discussion on Content from Wiki Pages

Dale has put together a collection of changes for the LIGO e-Lab, and Eric suggested that for some of the pages this might be a good time to further develop and use the mechanism he's set up to allow content to be edited in a wiki but then served from JSP pages. Mihael doesn't agree.

Mihael is concerned that this would require two separate mechanism to track changes, SVN for the JSP, and the wiki for the content. That makes it more complicated and more prone to errors. We discussed various pros and cons of the scheme for a while, with no conclusion, except that we need to get Dale's changes implemented soon. Tom will be busy with SC08 and Eric doesn't have write access to SVN, so Mihael will make the changes.

Action Item: Eric will forward Dale's changes to Mihael, who will make the edits. [Done - Mihael was already CC'd]

Content Management Systems

We got into a discussion about the relative merits of using BOINC forums and MediaWiki or some educational Content Management System, such as Moodle or Sakai. It turns out we both know the same Sakai developer, and we discussed the possibility of getting a meeting with him sometime if Eric ever gets to Chicago. Eric has already said he wants to set up a Moodle site to test it. Mihael will consider setting up a Sakai site for the same purpose, provided that it's easy to do. There's no timeline or action item for this, we're just talkin' about the indefinite future.

Meeting ended at 12:06 CST. (We started at 12:15 because Eric was late.)

-- Main.EricMyers - 12 Nov 2008