Since the last status report, the web developer position previously held by Scott Kehoe was vacated. We are currently looking to refill that position. In the interim, we have a temporary (Chris Bailey, who was previously filling the student assistant role) in that position who is working on a number of projects, including:
There is much discussion internally about where we want to go with our site, and what skills we need to look for in a web developer in order to accomplish that. In the best of all worlds we’ll be looking for someone who has excellent web system administration skills (including a deep understanding of Apache and Tomcat modules and integration issues), can act as our site DBA, has experience in web applications development in a number of languages, is willing to deal with site content issues, can handle community support for the site, and is able to assist staff, who use a variety of publishing methodologies, make easy use of the site’s content infrastructure. This will be a hard slot to fill given all of the requirements, but we are hopeful of finding someone with all of these skills at least at some level.
One of our first priorities once we have a full-time staff back on this project will be to determine what is still lingering behind on the old site (not just content, but functionality), what core functionality we want on our new site, and how to get there. There is concern that the current site framework may not be adequate for moving forward so an assessment of that will be done early on. Once that is accomplished and the site is stable we’ll begin talking again about the idea of web-based collaborations, web services, personalization, and other more state-of-the art functionalities that we’ve toyed with the idea of in the past. We will use the community to help guide our way.