Prototyping Weeknotes #21 (02/07/10)
The week starts with a team planning session. It's agreed that we'll finish off Zeitgeist and write it up, implement Theo's child-friendly designs for Digital Friendship and start on the communications material for that project. There are a lot of small bits of work happening - either new spikes or wrapping up old work - but probably only enough to keep people busy this week. George, Tris and I meet to do some longer term planning; it's our first in a while so the focus is on capturing all the projects and debating their status. There's some lively debate and we eventually reach a consensus on what we'll do next. Fortunately, the connectivity issues we were suffering with last week have improved; something somewhere has clearly been turned off, but we're not sure what.
On Tuesday morning Tris is over in W12 discussing a couple of web projects with colleagues in Vision, one is looking fairly concrete, the other is larger and harder to see where we'd start prototyping. Chris N, Sean and I finish off our requirements document for sys admin support; Sam is reviewing some P2P-Next documentation. Traffic incidents mean much of the team fail to get over to W12 for discussions and presentations on the R&D workplan but we can watch it online anyway. Good to see a couple of mentions of Prototyping in there. Tris and I chat further about the upcoming work and add some more projects to the board that I found whilst clearing out my inbox.
Zeitgeist seems to have stopped updating again which is frustrating. A few of us pop over for the Production Magic workplan session; lots of interesting stuff and some potential areas for collaboration. We catch-up with Justin and Ciaran afterwards; they're making good progress and I reckon we should have our servers moved within a month. Interesting meeting in the afternoon with some FM&T colleagues about a potential big project around time. It's loosely related to the Mythology work but more about personal storytelling; it sounds really interesting but it's not yet clear exactly what we'd prototype. Chris N is getting on well with the client-side coding for Digital Friendship, though he also admitted that he wan't sure he should have volunteered for this bit. Still, good to expand one's skills.
Off to W12 on Thursday lunchtime to support George where he's giving a talk to the rest of R&D on our work plan. Later on, Rowena pops in to talk about some partnership projects. We're still having major trouble restarting the ingest chain for Zeitgeist; Sean is going to have a final look today to see if he can resolve it. If not, we'll have to replace it with some ruby as it's just not stable enough to go live. Tris and I sort the final list of projects for next week and talk the team through them. Everyone seems broadly happy. There's some work for Audio & Music, a spike around some existing R&D work around synchronised content and a start on some energy monitoring work.
Friday. After a frustrating week, Sean concludes that we need to replace the ingest chain on Zeitgeist, it's just not reliable enough. It's going to delay the launch but seems the logical thing to do. Mark is settling in well and has spent the week reading lots of R&D white papers and DVB standards documentation. Sam has finished off most of his P2P-Next actions so should be free from Monday to work on the synchronised content spike. I finish up the day with some budget forecasting, a mind map of how we can get better at longer term planning, and these.
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