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Hi Dan, I saw your GWU posting on C4L last week and it sounds like you have a great shop. I hope you are enjoying it. I really appreciated the brief conversation I had with you at CNI last month. The SHARE plans are starting to come together with a bit more specificity, and just last week we learned we could be on a very fast track for some grant funding. While this is terrific for the project, it does mean we have to make some decisions without as much clarity as I'd like. I'm wondering if I can impose on you again for some thoughts on these decisions? If so, read on. We now have a project plan<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-7zHFvuOmgxv_RYCS8VSE7-3G9XYkUzflw-w1gsI-0E/edit>for the notification system I described to you in December. While this is still pretty much an internal document, feel free to look it over if you like. Essentially, we want to build a system that captures research release events from a variety of systems from CrossRef and CHORUS to VIVO and local repositories to systems like RePORT and the Open Science Framework. These events would represent publications, but also data sets or presentations or other outputs of the research process. The goal is to build a digest of these events that can be subscribed to (like "following" on Twitter) or queried by stakeholders such as offices of sponsored research at universities to managers of funding agencies (federal and private) to publishers themselves on the hunt for future authors and editors. Even though we are still defining the scope of this work and trying to come to grips with how much is already being done by some of the players, we are also trying to wrap this up in the form of a grant proposal this week. For the purposes of this grant, I've asked that we plan for a team of one development project manager and two full time programmers. We may have a site in NYC or Virginia willing to host this team, or we may want to allow the team to be distributed around the country in an effort to broaden our available pool. In particular, I'd love to get a project manager on board ASAP, since this person could help sort through some of the existing projects and open source codebases to determine from what foundation we would best launch the development effort. I believe we will have to start this small, focused on a partner or two and what we can harvest, how we can structure these "events" and store them for retrieval and push notifications, then iterate as we add partners and build toward the full notification system. The SHARE steering group supports all the code we write being open source (there was advocacy for the Educational Community License <http://opensource.org/licenses/ECL-2.0>, which I am not familiar with, but is an offshoot of Apache) and any data we assemble being CC0. I imagine this would be an agile project managed on github, though I was particularly intrigued by the degree to which it sounds like your shop has focussed on github as a management tool. Whew! That's a mouthful. I am wondering whether you have any advice given this summary. In particular, I am wondering if you have any thoughts about who might be a suited to being a project manager for this kind of effort and whether you have any wisdom to impart about the choice of embedding staff in a host institution vs. trying to manage a distributed team? At CNI you seemed interested in the potential of the project itself, I also wonder if this still sounds worthwhile to you or what warnings of advice about the scope of the task itself? Finally, you had mentioned both a staff member at GWU and a few other names when we were sitting at CNI, but if I wrote that on a piece of paper there, I am having a devil of a time finding it (partly because I am on the road this week). If you have any thoughts about people who would be good for this development team, let me know. The SHARE steering group imagines this could grow into something on the scale of I2 or Sparc, so it could have longer legs than just this notification system too. Of course, that will depend partly on how well we pull off this first step. Yikes! Another mouthful. OK, I'll stop there. :) Maybe I should just call. If so, give me a time and number and I'll try to ring you up. Thanks! ...Eric Eric Celeste / [log in to unmask] / http://eric.clst.org / 651-323-2009