Administration

With Scott and Greg, went to the IT Working Group meeting on Moodle.

Continued work on the HCMC site to make it easier to get useful printable output:

• Flagged all URLs which have content identical to their href attribute as class="IsURL".
• Wrote CSS to handle those.
• Enhanced the CSS to expand relative URLs into full URLs.
• Edited PHP to wrap each project description in a <div class="hcmcProject"> tag, so that content can be more attractively indented.
• Coded for that class in the CSS.

Spent some time with Scott and two researchers discussing ways to protect intellectual content and project data without undermining our documentation processes and code-sharing.

The workshop was quite good. I won't decribe it in too much detail at the moment (2 days of stuff), but I do hope to apply some of the techniques and practices I learned. I liked most the concrete steps and procedures for evaluating problems (presented as "gaps" between existing issues and desired outcomes), and the focus on consensus building in the decision making process. I also liked the concept and practical suggestions for establishing a groundwork for engagement. These are the "rules" for discussing issues, which staff and managers create together before tackling problems and making decisions.

There is ample material in my office for re-distribution if you are interested in HR's adopted approach for problem solving and decision making. The intended target is the "team" oriented workplace.