NCBO Developer Communications

Introduction

With support from the NCBO Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), the Chief Software Architect (CSA) established and drove the infrastructure to improve communications and collaboration across the NCBO and it's partners. This report summarized the successful results of those efforts.

NCBO Developer Communication Infrastructure

Through NCBO developer email correspondence, surveys, emails, phone calls, and the NCBO developers conference in December 2007, we identified an appropriate infrastructure and adopted it. The selection process was heavily influenced by those preferred tools already used by the majority of the participants. Not surprisingly, the infrastructure is not strictly limited to software tools. The infrastructure consists of a combination of tools, correspondence mechanisms, and shared documents.

1. NCBO GForge Site – Officially launched during the NCBO DevCon December 2007 with objective of migrating all NCBO software and related content to a central repository (https://bmir-gforge.stanford.edu/gf/project/ncbo/).
2. Instant Messaging - Skype
3. Email Lists – 'ncbo-developers@lists.stanford.edu'(for all NCBO developers) and 'ncbo-technical@lists.stanford.edu' (broader NCBO technical community including the NCBO developers)
4. NCBO Developer Contacts Document – A shared Google Document spreadsheet containing all NCBO developers contact information which includes email, phone, Skype name, and iCal URLs for busy/free times. Note that the iCal URLs enable a view of developers’ schedules to facilitate effective meeting planning.
5. NCBO Developer Bios Document – A shared Google Document spreadsheet describing a brief biography of every NCBO developer.

Quarterly NCBO Developer Conferences

The CSA plans, manages, and drives the quarterly NCBO developer conferences serve an opportunity developers to share ideas, to learn, and to collaborate. The developer survey feedback from these events have been very positive. The current attendees include NCBO developers, partners, and guest speakers. As long as funding is available, the NCBO will continue conducting these critical events to improve collaboration. Note that all materials from past NCBO DevCon are available from the [NCBO GForge site |https://bmir-gforge.stanford.edu/gf/project/ncbo/docman/?subdir=18].

Weekly Developer Meetings

The CSA conducts weekly developer meetings with distributed NCBO development teams, where appropriate. Meetings include weekly meetings with Mayo and Stanford developers.