Round Robin Project News (reprinted from http://roundrobin.ecite.org)
After CI36 (the global celebration of CI's 36th birthday) in June 2008 ,several of the participants expressed the desire for a way to connect and coordinate all the information and resources about CI on the Internet. It was agreed that a system that could serve CI and its practitioners worldwide was desired.
In September 2008, Dieter Heitkamp, Eckhard Müller, Norbert Page, and Nancy Stark Smith began discussing a model for a tool that would support the global CI community by directing them where to find different information in a complete and well organized format.
Norbert and Eckhard, with support from Tinu Hettich and Nancy, brought their ideas to ECITE in July 2009 in Ormskirk (UK) for feedback. Their original idea for a [cb1] "CI Lobby/Directory" on the Internet became the Round Robin Project. The idea was to create a synchronized, decentralized database, proposed by Tinu and supported by the rest of the ECITE "global website" workgroup, the ECITE community.
After the ECITE in Omskirk 2009 the steering team and tech team worked on the development of the Round Robin tool for a shared CI Calendar and CI Archive, developing clear definitions of the aims and the requirements of this self developed, community-owned and decentralized tool.
Simultaneously in 2008, there were many places in the world celebrating CI 36
Michael Ratajski and Sebastian Flegiel noticed a problem in their home country (Poland) so they cocoreated an online calendar with Dawid Koniecki which they did www.contactimprovisation.eu. Ecki contacted them to invite them to ECITE and Sebastain Flegiel attended to present it to the community a new version CI Calendar Event.
Their proposal was simple- to put all the info on their site and it would appear on all connected websites immediately and it was ready, it existed. The website was not embraced because it was centralized. Our programmer said that the technical side of maintaining a de-centralised system would require constant technical support and wasn’t advisable.
In this version, each CI website/webpage would store all the info of all the networking pages.. See this link for the ideas behind this idea: http://roundrobin.ecite.org for more information about the “white papers,” “best use practice,” “software requirements,” and “API specification” documents that we drew up during this early period.)
Tinu Hettich (contactimprovisation.ch) offered to program this tool and Martin Hülse (GER) helped with programming. Daniel Hayes (SP) was part of the steering committee as communicator/mediator during the early phase.
Other programmers that were involved as consultants were: Craig Harman (contactimprov.net), Tom Giebink (contactimprovisation.org), Brenton Chang, and Ken Manheimer (both ci36.com)
After almost 2 years of working on the RRP tool, Tinu and Martin had to step back from the project. Craig from contactimprov.net continued the project followed an idea using existing tools (an ical format and a Google calendar) to customise them. He did a first trial with Ken and Brenton. Later he collaborated with Davide Casiraghi (contactimprov.it), to create a test version in which tested their entries into the ical format and transferred it into a Google calendar (autumn 2012).
The Google Calendar was not a viable option.
In 2012, Ecki approached Michael again about contactimprovisation.eu calendar and there was some misunderstanding about their points of view. The calendar needed an upgrade but there wasn’t a budget to support that work.
In spring 2013, Davide (contactimprov.it) and Cristiano Siri, another Italian programmer, proposed a version which could be shared and linked in every existing CI webpage that was willing to join the global CI calendar network. Information could be accessed and entered via any of the participating CI pages, the “control of the calendar” would be in one place.
In autumn 2013 they collaborate with the Polish team that created contactimprovisation.eu page, which has a wonderfully organized CI calendar and seemed to be able to be shared with other existing CI webpages . The calendar had different search functions and the option to embed and personalize it on other pages. This calendar was quite close the initial vision of a shared global CI calendar’with some wishes for additions like:
• additional search function “teacher”
• additional search function “city”
• personalization of the calendar tool on each participating page, incl. language!
• if there could be several storage places for the same collected CI info (on different servers), the tool would be more safe and less centralized.
The collaboration didn’t work out as expected. The contactimprovisation.eu page needed a major update. Funding was needed to pay for reprogramming and the Steering Committee didn’t have the resources to pursue this option.
In summer 2014 a new attempt to program a calendar tool that would be shared with all who want to be part of this network. Davide Casiraghi joined as lead programmer.
The possibility of a programmed tool that could be embedded into all networking pages (like described above about the contactimprovisation.eu page) was discussed.
Davide (like other programmers) advised it is quite an ambitious project and there would be no guarantee that this tool would easily collaborate with all of the different programming languages of the networking pages.
The solution proposed by Davide and Cristiano was to create a smart global calendar website that resides on one page and gets linked to other CI webpages. The ideas about decentralization, community ownership, and multil-linguality would need to be addressed later.
In February 2015, Davide began programming. He created a working demo with support from Colleen and other volunteers in 2017.
Funding is needed to take the project further.
In September 2008, Dieter Heitkamp, Eckhard Müller, Norbert Page, and Nancy Stark Smith began discussing a model for a tool that would support the global CI community by directing them where to find different information in a complete and well organized format.
Norbert and Eckhard, with support from Tinu Hettich and Nancy, brought their ideas to ECITE in July 2009 in Ormskirk (UK) for feedback. Their original idea for a [cb1] "CI Lobby/Directory" on the Internet became the Round Robin Project. The idea was to create a synchronized, decentralized database, proposed by Tinu and supported by the rest of the ECITE "global website" workgroup, the ECITE community.
After the ECITE in Omskirk 2009 the steering team and tech team worked on the development of the Round Robin tool for a shared CI Calendar and CI Archive, developing clear definitions of the aims and the requirements of this self developed, community-owned and decentralized tool.
Simultaneously in 2008, there were many places in the world celebrating CI 36
Michael Ratajski and Sebastian Flegiel noticed a problem in their home country (Poland) so they cocoreated an online calendar with Dawid Koniecki which they did www.contactimprovisation.eu. Ecki contacted them to invite them to ECITE and Sebastain Flegiel attended to present it to the community a new version CI Calendar Event.
Their proposal was simple- to put all the info on their site and it would appear on all connected websites immediately and it was ready, it existed. The website was not embraced because it was centralized. Our programmer said that the technical side of maintaining a de-centralised system would require constant technical support and wasn’t advisable.
In this version, each CI website/webpage would store all the info of all the networking pages.. See this link for the ideas behind this idea: http://roundrobin.ecite.org for more information about the “white papers,” “best use practice,” “software requirements,” and “API specification” documents that we drew up during this early period.)
Tinu Hettich (contactimprovisation.ch) offered to program this tool and Martin Hülse (GER) helped with programming. Daniel Hayes (SP) was part of the steering committee as communicator/mediator during the early phase.
Other programmers that were involved as consultants were: Craig Harman (contactimprov.net), Tom Giebink (contactimprovisation.org), Brenton Chang, and Ken Manheimer (both ci36.com)
After almost 2 years of working on the RRP tool, Tinu and Martin had to step back from the project. Craig from contactimprov.net continued the project followed an idea using existing tools (an ical format and a Google calendar) to customise them. He did a first trial with Ken and Brenton. Later he collaborated with Davide Casiraghi (contactimprov.it), to create a test version in which tested their entries into the ical format and transferred it into a Google calendar (autumn 2012).
The Google Calendar was not a viable option.
In 2012, Ecki approached Michael again about contactimprovisation.eu calendar and there was some misunderstanding about their points of view. The calendar needed an upgrade but there wasn’t a budget to support that work.
In spring 2013, Davide (contactimprov.it) and Cristiano Siri, another Italian programmer, proposed a version which could be shared and linked in every existing CI webpage that was willing to join the global CI calendar network. Information could be accessed and entered via any of the participating CI pages, the “control of the calendar” would be in one place.
In autumn 2013 they collaborate with the Polish team that created contactimprovisation.eu page, which has a wonderfully organized CI calendar and seemed to be able to be shared with other existing CI webpages . The calendar had different search functions and the option to embed and personalize it on other pages. This calendar was quite close the initial vision of a shared global CI calendar’with some wishes for additions like:
• additional search function “teacher”
• additional search function “city”
• personalization of the calendar tool on each participating page, incl. language!
• if there could be several storage places for the same collected CI info (on different servers), the tool would be more safe and less centralized.
The collaboration didn’t work out as expected. The contactimprovisation.eu page needed a major update. Funding was needed to pay for reprogramming and the Steering Committee didn’t have the resources to pursue this option.
In summer 2014 a new attempt to program a calendar tool that would be shared with all who want to be part of this network. Davide Casiraghi joined as lead programmer.
The possibility of a programmed tool that could be embedded into all networking pages (like described above about the contactimprovisation.eu page) was discussed.
Davide (like other programmers) advised it is quite an ambitious project and there would be no guarantee that this tool would easily collaborate with all of the different programming languages of the networking pages.
The solution proposed by Davide and Cristiano was to create a smart global calendar website that resides on one page and gets linked to other CI webpages. The ideas about decentralization, community ownership, and multil-linguality would need to be addressed later.
In February 2015, Davide began programming. He created a working demo with support from Colleen and other volunteers in 2017.
Funding is needed to take the project further.