Week 12

What is one proposal one of your task force group members is working on? Describe it in a few sentences, and then point out one strength so far of what you seen and one thing that can be improved upon. You might include a hyperlink to your peer's specific proposal.

I’ve tried to familiarize myself with Lennie’s first proposal: providing documentation for the latest version (ver 5) of the encore learning environment. EnCore is a MOO, which means it’s an object-oriented software bundle for real-time communication. It is an open-source, volunteer project, and various implementations of the encore MOO are used by universities, schools, and other educational entitities.

Lennie’s strength is his dedication and wide breadth of knowledge concerning this software. He’s been using it for year—literally years—and knows about others who use it and want to develop it. I know Lennie personally, and he’s always looking for ways to promote and improve the MOO.

Weaknesses: I don’t know if this qualifies as a weakness, but this project strikes me as having two distinct difficulties: the MOO is open-source and developed by volunteers. This means that developing good documentation will be subject to the whims of individual timelines and the vagaries of a changing software package. In other words, version 5 may not be the same from one installation to the next, which means the documentation may need to be modified from one installation to the next. Hard to handle.

The other difficult I foresee here has to do with managing a project over multiple organizations, including volunteers from TTU, nationwide, and even in Europe. To me, this spells Organizational Trouble in terms of keeping people up-to-date and working on the right things at the right time.

I have to admit that I’ve seen Lennie (face-to-face and online) work as an administrator and I think he’s up to the task.