Face to face collaboration

Due to people being in town for the PHIN conference, we had a face to face meeting this morning with many of the phGrid collaborators.

It's nice to finally put faces to voices and email addresses and even though telepresence is useful, there's still no beating flesh and blood for easily communicating. Although we still had a dial in line as some of us couldn't be there in person.

We talked with Pittsburgh, WashingtonU, UtahU, Johns Hopkins APL, Ohio State BMI, Columbia University and NCPHI Lab.

We recapped the services built and demonstrated and also talked about next steps.

The immediate agreed upon next steps are to plan out how to connect together the services developed by different groups, set up some sort of simple description set of each service to let others know about service information, link to each others public source code repositories, find some specific public health use cases to drive future development and extend our current set of services.

There's actually a lot more around next steps but it is too much to describe in this post. Over the next week, we're collecting the next steps together and will post some more ideas for future proof of concept projects.

We also talked about some ways to approach collaboration and source control. Ohio State has two really good examples of how they do it:
CaGrid Incubator
CaGrid GForge