The VALA Committee is seeking expressions of interest from people who would consider becoming a member of the Conference Programme Committee for VALA2008.
There are two possibilities: becoming an attending member of the Committee, or a “corresponding” (via e-mail) member of the Committee.
The first meeting of this Committee (strictly speaking, a subcommittee) has been scheduled for Monday 31 July 2006 at 5.30 p.m in the Conference room, level 5, RMIT Central Library, Building 8, 360 Swanston Street, Melbourne.
The Programme Committee (usually a group of about 10 or 12) will normally meet monthly (mostly on the 4th week of the month) between now and mid-2007, although additional meetings may be called (probably in May 2007). Meetings may not be required every month in early 2007, depending on response to queries via e-mail. The Programme Committee’s work for the Conference includes researching and suggesting keynote speakers, the theme for the Conference, the topics and text of the call for papers, evaluating abstracts submitted, reviewing submitted papers, organising the “streams” for parallel sessions and for each day of the Programme, and assisting at the Conference.
If you would like to be involved, but would be unable to attend meetings, it is possible to be a corresponding member. You would receive minutes of the meetings and your contributions and responses would be sought via e-mail. You would still be included as a reviewer.
It is also possible to contribute by being a reviewer (October to December 2007), without being involved in the other planning for the Conference.
A range of people is being sought, so if you are interested in participating, let us know as soon as possible (even if you are unable to come to the first meeting). (Alyson Kosina
VALA Secretariat Email: [email protected])
July 24th, 2006
Posted by
tango | Conferences, All sectors |
one comment
Here at the RUBRIC project we need to keep a close eye on our project. The way that we do that is using the Trac project management system. It allows us to keep an eye on things such as:
- Tasks that we are currently undertaking, plan to undertake, and have completed via “tickets”
- It allows us to see each others tickets, and if necessary adjust our timelines according
- Provide an overview of project timelines, and progress towards those deadlines
- Issues that our project partners have alerted us to, and we need to investigate
- It provides us with the wiki environment that I’ve posted about before
We recently opened up the access to our Trac website and have allowed the project managers at our partner institutions to put tickets into the system. The technical manager can then assign them to us and we can add the amount of time we think it will take, and adjust our work schedules accordingly. We’ve found this works really well and is a good supplement to the existing communication we have with the project partners via email, the wiki, teleconferences, and the website.
Systematically managing the project is, in my opinion, a requirement for a successful project. It doesn’t really matter if the way you manage the project is via Trac, or other software such as a Microsoft Project, or via a whiteboard in the office. The important thing is that everyone involved in the project is aware of the direction of the project, what they need to do, and when they need to do it by.
Something as simple as a to-do list written on a piece of paper, or a list of tasks in Microsoft Outlook, can also be seen as ways of managing projects, especially if you’re the only one on the project. Very small projects can benefit from some form of project management, and in a distributed team environment like we have at the RUBRIC project effective project management is a must.
July 24th, 2006
Posted by
techxplorer | Australia, Queensland, Academic libraries, Special projects |
no comments
Here at the RUBRIC project we share information a lot. One of the ways we share links to websites and other information of interest is via del.icio.us. The del.icio.us website is one of those “web 2.0” websites we are increasingly hearing about. Using the del.icio.us service we’re able to “tag” links to websites of interest and share them with the other members of our project. The website provides RSS feeds which means when one of us tags a new link we all find out about it via our aggregators.
Many of us have accounts with del.icio.us and use our account to keep track of links that are of interest to us. When we want to share a link with another member of the team we “tag” it with a common tag. We have one tag for technical information, and a separate tag for more general information.
By using a service like this we reduce the amount of email we send to each other. It also means that people in the project can be self selecting about the information they receive from us. If they’re interested in technical information about institutional repositories, they can monitor the feed for that specific tag. If they’re not interested they don’t have to monitor the tag.
I would encourage anyone involved in a project to investigate the use of del.icio.us and similar technologies. We’ve certainly found them useful.
July 24th, 2006
Posted by
techxplorer | Australia, Queensland, Academic libraries, Useful resources, New technologies, Special projects |
one comment
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