Last week saw the first meeting of all the GrassPortal project partners at Losehill Hall in the scenic surroundings of the Peak District (to see a bunch of scientists and IT specialists sliding around in the mud, take a look at Sam’s photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/reverendsam/sets/72157622978577032/). We were privileged to have our project partners come all the way from Kew, Switzerland and the USA. Unfortunately, however, for our jet-lagged American partners there was no respite as we dived straight into two work-intensive days, fleshing out the tools and functionalities GrassPortal will possess. It was extremely useful having a group of people with areas of expertise ranging from IT to ecology to evolutionary biology and systematics in formulating the design of GrassPortal.
After finalizing our “vision” for GrassPortal, we spent the last day creating an action plan for achieving our goals. The most immediate task that we need to complete is to interview potential end users to evaluate what they would want GrassPortal to do and the types of questions they would be trying to answer when using the portal. Through our various partners we hope to gather feedback from a wide audience, but this blog post is also meant as a call to anyone interested in becoming involved in this part of the project. All we would need from you is to answer a few questions in an online survey. If GrassPortal interests you, and you would like it to be able to do the types of things you require for your area of research, please contact me (Vernon: vernon@grassportal.org) or Colin (colin@grassportal.org) and we’ll make sure that we take your needs into account when developing GrassPortal.
