IT Development/Board report 4Oct 2014

Please feel free to add comments to the talk page. This page is intended to support the committee-board interaction, aiding the committee in reporting to the board, and the board in understanding and responding to the committee's needs. It is based on Education Committee/Board template; suggested changes to the structure should be addressed there.

• Harry Burt developed his prototype voice recorder, and worked on it with Andy Mabbett at Wikimania.
• Harry has also developed a prototype "safe sandbox", intended so that primary school children can do wiki article editing in an appropriate environment. The prototype, on Wikimedia Labs, has been shown to Ian Stuart, working for the Scottish government, who requested it at the Education fringe meeting in June. Harry needs to work with someone on their side on authentication; as of writing this the ball is in their court.
• The VLE launch, as agreed in discussion with Stevie Benton, depends only on sorting out the single sign-on mechanism, which needs to be patched after a Moodle upgrade. A volunteer is working on this.
• The Wikisoba project now has a proposed architecture, which can be seen at https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Wikisoba_project. A main point of the proposal there is to allow participation and collaboration on educational material (as WMUK argued in its House of Lords evidence). The proposed interleaving of text and questions would handle this by two routes: text sections being on wiki pages (as in the Mark I tool), while questions would be drawn from a purpose-built repository. A volunteer group is currently working on development.