Peer Review: Bolton, April 25th 2007.

Colin and I attended the peer review meeting held in Bolton on Wednesday (April 25th 2007). Although most people stayed the previous night, we opted for a nice early (06.35) train up from Oxford!

I had been to Bolton University for a previous meeting and upon leaving the station on foot was pretty sure we were heading in the right direction. However, after about quarter of an hour, I realized we'd gone the wrong way! So we double backed on ourselves and caught a mini-cab instead. As it was we only missed about 5 minutes of the meeting proper.

We were one of the teams in a group of three, with ResourceBrowser and DesignShare. We were reviewed by ResourceBrowser and reviewed DesignShare. A full description of what I found can be found in our wiki here. However, undoubtedly one of the most impressive features of their project is that they already have demonstrable software! Alas, we did not have a great deal for ResourceBrowser to review; we have our project infrastructure in place, but not a great deal of content yet :-(.

I definitely think the whole exercise was useful and worthwhile. I believe (from my experience of working on the TReCX project last year) the most useful aspect is that it forces toolkit developers in particular to examine their own projects from the point of view of how someone else coming to it would. If they do that (and take the reviewers feedback on board) then this should give the outputs of the project a sporting chance of actually being adopted by anybody else.