CREW

For remote recording and annotation without the internet – you need a Kit. This is the first version 1 of the CREW-Kit as used at the Eurographics UK Chapter conference (TP.CG’08 – Theory and Practice of Computer Graphics 2008) http://www.eguk.org.uk/TPCG08/index.html

The kit contains everything you need (excluding electricity) to record and annotate a presentation. It is also designed to be portable or at least luggable in a couple of rucksacks.

The event was the 26th annual conference for Eurographics UK and CREW recorded two of the keynote presentations.

Last week the 4th International Conference on e-Social Science took place at the Manchester Conference Centre with about 160 participants attending (see conference website). CREW was included with a paper on ‘User-centered development of a Virtual Research Environment to support Collaborative Research Events’ (see paper & presentation), presented in a user requirements and usability session, together with another VRE2 project, VERA.

Focussing on “user-designer relations, requirements work, support for communities, training and education requirements and models of access to resources”, the ‘Fostering e-Infrastructure: from user-designer relations to community engagement’ workshop, held Thursday 8 and Friday 9 May 2008 at the National e-Science Institute (NeSC) in Edinburgh, was a useful forum for exchange.

All talks have been well received (and can be found here), among them the presentation of the community engagement activities in the CREW VRE project, and led to a lively discussion covering topics like

• Where is ICT needed and what can I really do with having a new ICT/e-science environment?
• Does traditional user engagement (stuff around for a while in CSCW, HCI, PD, etc) work [best] in small groups, homogeneous groups, practically aligned interests, design of well described systems, serving well-definded purposes?
• How to open up eventually a space between Grid and Web 2.0?
• How do we operationalise the knowledge/ideas, we all gather(ed) in our work?
• Are funding programmes suitable the way they are and are there more synergies to be taken into account in, between and around projects?