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Hi, At the DLF Forum in April, a few of us started having corridor conversations about the idea of holding a DLF “Project Managers’ Forum” pre-conference, mirroring the “Developers’ Forum” that has existed for many years (and that mostly targets programmers). The idea would be to have a half day session (probably on Monday morning) where DL project managers could share their experiences, strategies, challenges, etc. It would be open to anyone who manages DL projects (large or small), and more generally to anyone interested in the topic of DL project management. Here are some examples of issues we could talk about: * How do you manage cultural differences among the project participants (IT staff vs. catalogers vs. content specialists)? Acting as a translator. * How do you come up with a realistic time line? * How do you control the “feature creep” in a project? * Staffing: how do you ensure continuity despite grant-funded short- term positions and natural staff turnover? * Managing a portfolio of projects: how do you prioritize? how do you control the impact of the projects on each other in terms of resource allocation? * Managing expectations: how do you communicate about time lines and other issues with the various stake-holders of a projects (including top library managers) * Which software management tools have you found useful and not too much of an overhead? * How do you find project management training that relates to the (non corporate) Digital Library environment. * How do long-term maintenance issues and legacy projects affect your operations? * Are there specific initiatives that DLF could take to help DL project managers? So we would like to gage interest here. Who among you would potentially consider attending such a session? (You can just reply to [log in to unmask] with a quick "yes I would be interested". Of course if you have more elaborate suggestions or comments, we would love to hear about them.) Thanks, Delphine Khanna (U. of Pennsylvania) and Jennifer Vinopal (NYU)