Internationalisation Meeting - 24/5/17

Owned by Andrew White (Unlicensed)
24 May, 2017

Attendees

  • Andy White, Andrew Brazzatti, Gavin Kennedy

Minutes

In order to prepare for the OR2017 Conference where we will have an international audience we need to prepare ourselves so the Engineering Team are in a position to be able to provide International Support for ReDBox.  

  • Update of website  

Was on our agenda but has slipped.  This is something we still want to do in-house.  Gavin is still investigating GitHub but he will pass it onto Matt who should have some capacity from next week.

  • Setup a demo box with real data accessible from the website that people can play with.

We will do this as part of the preparation for the Workshop for OR2017.  AB is setting up containers which can be deployed, so if we get time we will also set this up.

  • Marketing material including  youtube videos

Not too many hard copies or current marketing material still floating around .  GK will update the current material and order more copies to be printed.  

Short ReDBox youtube demo videos on the QCIF channel would be useful to link to from the website.  AW will do when he gets the opportunity but will be a lower priority.

  • Internationalise Support Agreement

The current ReDBox Support Agreement need to be refreshed if we want to use if for international support.  There are references to ABNs, Australian Institutions and missing clarity around Time Zones.  It is in not too bad shape though.  AW to have a look at other international software agreements and then update current ReDBox Agreement accordingly.  Will then pass to GK and AB to review.   It will eventually have to go past UQ Legals. Likely to take some time so this will be a priority.

  • Trademark

ReDBox is not a problem in the local context but could be in a wider international environment.  GK thinks this is not too much of an issue and we can deal with it at the time it does become an issue.  There are many ReDBox’s internationally and ours is actually Research Data Box.

  • Exchange rates

We currently advertise support in AUS Dollars.  How should we deal with the exchange rates?  Make institutions deal with the exchange rates?  AW to investigate best practice and see how other software companies deal with this.

  • Support times

Current support is offered during Australian Business Hours.  This could be an issue with different time zones and is often one of the criteria institutions use to select a product.  We will stick with the current support model but will be able to offer a silver support service for extra money based on a discussion.  If need be we might be able to work with AARNET to setup a 24/7 monitoring and automatically reboot service for our hosted systems.

  • Managing this through QCIF ( will this be supported by the members?)

Need to ensure we have the support of QCIF and its members in going international as well as the blessing of the CEO.  GK provided Phil with an overview of ReDBox yesterday.  He is still getting up to speed and internationalisation was briefly mentioned.  For now we will continue to push ahead with our current direction (keeping Phil in the loop) as we need to diversity our current support base and find other sources of funds.  We will deal with questions/concerns as they arise.

  • Technical Considerations:

Compliance with DataCite and DDI standards which are used by the international community.

We are compatible with Dublin Core and if we need to extend to other standards it should not be too much of an issue as we only need to develop a crosswalk which we could charge for..  Things are stored in a generic way so it is not an issue.

Language Packs

Some places may require a language pack eg NZ even though the system is not really public facing.  There is currently some support but it is not really complete.  We have not been asked for this to date so will be lower priority for now.

Domain Specific Packs

We could do something with this without too much effort.