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We're starting a new project this week, Dashboard, which we're planning to iterate on for the next ten days. It's primarily Duncan and Tristan working on it, and with such tight timescales features are likely to be quite minimal initially.ÌýTheo and Vicky are starting to scope out the Outreach project, it's really exciting but seems a little daunting.ÌýAkua, Sam and Sean are back in the office so it feels a bit more like a normal week.ÌýThe advert for our vacant has gone out.

George is in Manchester interviewing people for R&D Industrial Trainee roles, meeting with R&D North people, and catching up with some of his old TV Platforms colleagues. He's impressed with the new R&D North Lab (and the beer prices up there).

Tuesday begins with a lengthy discussion about Microblogging use case 3, which is looking at inbound links to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳. Sean is going to do a quick tech spike to clarify a few things before we integrate with our ingest chain. Vicky is going to start working up some possible visualisations. Chris N and Theo are in W12 learning more about triple stores and SPARQL. Vicky, Tristan, Theo and I have another go at the Themes board. We make some progress but hit a wall; we need to come back to it with fresh minds.

As part of the Dashboard project,ÌýDuncan has set up a simple Rails template for our projects that just creates an empty vanilla Rails app and supporting files in our preferred configuration.ÌýIt's a first pass but should save us time during project start up. We find out that we'll be presenting the Mythology project at the all staff conference on Monday so Tristan has some extra work to do.

On Wednesday we continue working on our themes for next quarter; George adds a couple of new ones. It's looking like we'll have 4-5 main areas of work for the next 6 months or so which feels about right.ÌýChris B has finished tidying up the loose ends on Coventry. Tristan's been checking it daily and whilst there are still a few anomalies in the data, it's definitely good enough for a prototype. The guys from the Music team come down for a demo and are really pleased so we'll release it soon.

Tim C from Audio & Music comes down to talk about events and what social features they plan to use; we conclude not to continue with our events use case for Microblogging. It's disappointing but we've gained some valuable learning. I guess that's why we try to use an agile approach, fail fast if you're going to fail. On the plus side, Sean is now successfully scraping and expanding ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ links from the update stream.ÌýFritz, who worked on our multi-touch prototype, is also in this morning to handover his work to Chris B and Duncan.ÌýMore visitors in the afternoon from Vision to talk about multi-touch, second screens and synchronous quizzes. George is again interviewing for Industrial Trainees, this time in London.

So it's Friday; Tristan is writing up the Coventry project ahead of the release and blog post, George is meeting with Peter Brightwell, Phil Tudor and others from R&D to talk about the Ingex project and possible collaborations, Chris N is attending an internal QA day in W12 and the Dashboard has it's first data on it - the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ bus times! It has been hectic again this week, but that's how it should be.