I cavalierly said I'd post "a couple of times" a week, but I think I'm settling into once a week. I hear the sighs of disappointment, but I'll at least try to be interesting once a week.

Tomorrow we convene our developer corps (or core, there's some disagreement) for the first time. We've got a crack team of five new and experienced staffers who want to work on the lab's continuing projects. So this week, Ithought I'd give a little sketch of what the developers do, and how they're organized.

Starting last year, we clustered developers in three sub-groups, which we named Publicity (they took care of our publications and colloquium planning), Pedagogy (they produced an excellent series of Spotlights on Teaching), and Web (they maintained the site and planned for the switch to Drupal). These groupings struck a compromise between between a one-to-one or two-to-one developer-project ratio, which resulted in a slack-to-swamped work cycle and the all for one model which allowed us maximum flexibility but not sufficient expertise. The model was a huge success: we got a lot of work done last year. This year we have fewer developers, five instead of nine. Based on the interests that the applicants expressed and on our most pressing needs, the Pedagogy group, which I was set to coordinate, is going dormant until spring. The Publicity group has two major projects coming up: the colloquium and the annual issue of our journal Currents. The Web group has plenty to do: our transition to the Drupal CMS was relatively smooth, but there are plenty of details to attend to, and they also need to reimagine the role of the Web developer with a content management system. (See this whitepaper for further speculation). I'll pitch in with both these projects, but keep the pedagogical mission constantly in mind. The colloquium can be a great forum for discussing pedagogy, and the implications of CMS and teaching have barely been addressed. With the unexpected influx of instructors using Drupal, the documentation needs drastic revision, and we should be thinking about kick-starting the assignments database, possibly by applying for a LAITS grant.

Sorry for the stream-of-consciousness, but I wanted to get these thoughts down, especially since I can't attend the first Developers meeting tomorrow. I'll be away until Weds 9/14, but will be back here shortly after.