[245] in magellan
Events Calendar progress report, 7/29/99
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Deborah A. Levinson)
Thu Jul 29 10:41:14 1999
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Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 10:40:34 -0400
To: magellan@mit.edu
From: "Deborah A. Levinson" <debby@MIT.EDU>
Cc: events-team@mit.edu
Project Name: Events Calendar
Project Leader: Debby Levinson
Report Date: 7/29/99
Project Notebook: http://web.mit.edu/cwis/projects/eventscalendar/
Accomplishments past period
- Held focus group with members of InfoGroup and UA President about posting
policies.
- Contacted Amplitude Systems to discuss technical questions; am waiting to
hear back from them on issues of certificate support.
Goals for the coming period
- Get a final answer from Amplitude about certificate support -- if they
can't do it, we're down to *one* product: TechCalendar!
- Meet with Boris to talk about TechCalendar technical issues
- Schedule time with Scott Thorne to do data modeling.
- Make final decisions about policy recommendations based on focus group data
- Meet with other IS project leaders about bulk messaging systems.
Issues
- Email is unlikely to be an issue with Amplitude, since their mailer is
SMTP-compliant. However, their pricing model may be completely unreasonable
for MIT. They charge per publisher ($200 or so), which could be extremely
expensive given the posting policy we plan to recommend. (With potentially
over 1,000 publishers, we could be talking about a $200,000 license, which
makes TechCalendar even more appealing!)
Key learnings
- Focus group members suggested having an "advisory board" of
administrators and students during the early stages of events calendar
rollout.
- Focus group members agreed with a distributed publishing model we
proposed
(http://web.mit.edu/cwis/projects/eventscalendar/focus-group.html#scenario-2) an
d felt that if that model worked well, we could eventually move to an even
more distributed model
(http://web.mit.edu/cwis/projects/eventscalendar/focus-group.html#scenario-3).
Team dynamics
- We slowed down a bit during July, with our technical advisors out of the
country ... we still plan to make a final decision by mid-August, though.
Additional comments
-
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Debby Levinson
Electronic Publishing Consultant
MIT Campus Wide Information Systems
debby@mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/debby/www/
Humanity has an amazing inability to plan. Not too many
generations ago, when our relatives lived by hunting and
gathering, the inability to plan for the next season meant
death. Planners survived. The clueless died. But today,
Homo Sapiens eats at McDonalds - for the moment, planning
and survival are not strongly linked. --David Isenberg
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