[Seek-taxon] April and May Meetings

[Beach, James H]

Dear All:

Bill Michener and I had a call this morning and later brought on Laura
Downey into the conversation to discuss plans for the April and May SEEK
Taxon meetings.  We made some decisions that we feel make the SEEK-Taxon
process more efficient wrt the usability process we initiated in Santa
Barbara.  It is important to realize that we are making the changes
below in the best interest of the SEEK-Taxon process and of our
collaboration.  We feel the changes will ultimately allow the project to
have more science impact, by making us better focused and informed going
forward.

The April 26-27 meeting proposed for Denver will be changed to a smaller
meeting with Kate Jones, Laura Downey and Nico Franz, only, in
Albuquerque.  Laura would also like to know if the dates could be moved
up one day to Mon & Tues the 25th and 26th, if not, 26-27 are OK.  The
LTER office will coordinate the housing and logistics.  The meeting will
be at the LTER offices.

Bill and I in particular felt that this would be a much more reasonable
expenditure concomitant with the fact that only a single archetypal user
or persona would be represented. This will unfortunately limit Kate's
exposure to the visualization approaches and to other ideas about
automating taxon processing tasks that we have, but the benefit is a
less costly meeting and one that can serve as a prototype meeting for a
broader usability process that Bill is willing to help pay for later in
the summer.   Laura will come to the May meeting (as will Nico) and
report on those results.

For the May meeting, we would like not to invite any other potential
users (and not Kate), but rather spend an extra day discussing the
results of the tasks analysis interview with Kate Jones AND to plan for
future usability process with a larger number of users in the
summer-that would be some kind small workshop with more than one but
fewer than 10 people which is focused on usability information gathering
and feedback to our ideas.  Bill and I (and Laura) see that as a much
more effective way to allocate SEEK travel funds and to maximize the
information content in meetings that are part of this process.

This is a complex situation and one that represents compromise and some
short-term sacrifice to be able to better structure the process of
determining software engineering requirements and priorities on
SEEK-Taxon.

Jim


_____________________________
James H. Beach
Biodiversity Research Center
University of Kansas
1345 Jayhawk Boulevard
Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
T 785 864-4645, F 785 864-5335