Beginning in January, we’d like to reinstate regular Tech Peer Group meetings, and we need your input to help us review how we conduct the meetings and what the content should be.

EdWeb has been Live for several months, and we have migrated upwards of 100 sites into the new system.  We are also very conscious that whilst we have been busy with the central CMS implementation and migrations, the EdWeb Distribution has been out ‘in the wild’.  During that time, the original convener of the Tech Peer Group, Dave Berry, has moved to a new role and I have stepped in to take his place.  In light of all this, it seems an appropriate time to review how the Tech Peer Group fits into the EdWeb landscape and to do that, we need your help.

New year, new TPG focus

Beginning in January, we’d like to reinstate regular Tech Peer Group meetings, and we need your input to help us review how we conduct the meetings and what the content should be.  We’d like focus on making the sessions, and the Tech Peer Group as a whole, more of a collaborative route to share issues and problems with the aim of finding solutions and ways forward that will benefit us all. We want to foster innovation, supporting people to achieve certain local business goals and to feed this work back to the central system via the CAB process. To do this we understand we need to offer more support and most importantly, open up some more channels of communication.

We realise that a number of Schools or business units may feel a bit isolated from our processes, particularly as our focus for some time now has been EdWeb central and we’d like to address that.

We are proposing the first meeting would consist of a discussion on where and how we go from here, covering such topics as:

• How to make better use of the EdWeb Distribution site for collaboration among Tech Peer Group members, including IS Apps developers, and how this fits into the general CAB processes (we are aware that we have neglected the Distribution site as a communication channel since it was set up)
• What use people have made of the EdWeb Distribution to date and what sticking points they have come up against (it would be great if we could have some ‘show and tell’ micro-presentations as part of this session)
• How we can best support people who are using the EdWEb Distribution, both to get set up, and to extend it or modify configuration to meet local needs (how to ‘un-EdWeb’ the Distribution, if you will!)
• How we can best communicate upcoming technical developments, and collaborate to produce effective requirements.
• How to share case studies and best practice across all platforms and CMS.

Next TPG meetings

We have recruited a volunteer from the Tech Peer Group to help us put together the agenda for our initial meeting, followed by a series of agendas for meetings in the coming six months targeting areas and issues that we identify at that first meeting.

In conjunction with the meetings, we are looking at ways that we can make the Tech Peer Group more of a support network for technical people using EdWeb, the Distribution and EdGEL, as well as any other web developers who might have an interest in contributing.

If you would like to be involved in helping us to build a Tech Peer Group that meets your needs, please do get in touch and let us know if you have any suggestions for agenda topics!  Otherwise look forward to seeing you on the January 28 at the first meeting of 2016!

To book:MyEd Event Booking for tech peer group meeting

We’d be very grateful if you could answer a few questions by filling in our survey to help us improve things going into the future. Please fill the survey in if you are coming to the next meeting or if you have been to any meetings previously.

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/837G2X5