External

Last week was a busy week. A lot of external (whole day) meetings to which I had an active contribution. This makes your schedule very tight. First because there is little preparation time, second because you have no time to work out the results of the meetings. Starting Jan. 30th we had a Sakai information session at the University of Twente (UT). About 30 colleagues attended the meeting and were interested in the latest developments of the Sakai project. On the same day I attended a workshop on the future ICT Architecture for the UT. The contents of the workshops was not very surprising, but seems in line with other initiaves such as 3TU (see below). On Jan. 31th I went to Utrecht to a SURF Sakai SIG meeting. It was interesting to see how enthousiastic commercial partners like MemoTrainer, Portfolio4U and LOI are involved in the Sakai community. The minutes of this meeting can be found here. Feb. 1th I had to go to Utrecht again, to lead a projectmeeting of the Integrated Science Projectteam (Digital University). The importance of this meeting was rather high, because of an upcoming meeting with the DU program manager. The Feb. 1 meeting was organised to determine how far the several workpackages have proceeded. Since the last plenary meeting in June, I only had bilateral contacts with the involved project members. The June meeting was a sort of starting point for the realisation work that had to be done. I can say that I was rather relieved at the end of the day. Two of five workpackages are more or last finished. The other three were in progress, but within the time frame that was foreseen. The only worry was to get in time all the administrative details (hours spent on the project). It's nice to see that some people indeed have submitted their hours, as we 'speak'. Feb. 2th for the third consecutive day to Utrecht (it has also advantages not to live in Twente...) for a 3TU ICT workshop. I had to present to project idea that was formed within the project group on the federative digital learning and working environment for the 3TU. The project idea is based on setting up a functional services architecture first, before looking at information sources and applications. So, in ICT terms, the business layer gets first (the primary process), then we'll proceed to the next layer. It was nice to see how the project idea perfectly fits within a more generic approach of a 3TU Architecture that is being developed in another working group. This week is rather 'normal'. I hope to find the time to work out all the issues I have been dealing with in the last few days.