I’ve just had a good chat with Alex Hawker, Programme Manager of the Flexible Delivery Programme that Total ReCal is funded under. We received some good comments about the bid that we put in and there’s a particular interest in the idea of working with ‘space-time’ data. Our (student) developers, Alex and Nick, are on leave for the next week, but we’ve already met to discuss the points that JISC have asked us to clarify and develop in order to satisfy funding requirements. They are:

• More detailed dissemination and workplan
• Engagement with other institutions to test the solution against other applications
• Data gathering to be undertaken when students are available

My first task is to address these in the Project Plan, which will be submitted by the 29th. Much of the project budget has been allocated to buying Alex and Nick’s time as developers, so we’ll have the equivalent of almost one developer (30hrs) working full-time on this project for six months.

In addition to the Project Plan, our immediate ToDo list currently looks like this:

• Setup UserVoice (Done)
• Setup Bitbucket (Done)
• Intro blog post – what we’re doing and why
• MongoDB/NoSQL evaluation
• Set up surveys for users
• Blog post about the plugins we intend to create
• Blog post about the work we’re doing towards integrated service development

We should have all of those done by the 6th August. Some of this has already been touched on in Alex and Nick’s personal blogs over the last few months.