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2018-05-02 Weekly Check-in

2018-05-02 Weekly Check-in

Owned by Ben Leibert
Last updated: May 29, 2018 by Christine Lenihan

Date

Attendees

Notes

  • Dércio Duvane reached out to the E-SISTAFE folks and has asked for access to their system. If all goes well, they'll allow us to use their API. Dercio thinks there's high probability they'll refuse, though, in which case we'll instead have to rely on CSV files manually extracted from their system.

  • The trimestrial reports will be manually provided by end users. Until now, we've talked about asking them to do so via an emailed "template." Most folks imagined this to mean a CSV file attached to an email. Should we instead provide a web form, though? 
    •  Advantages of a web form:
      • Easy to use and can provide data validation.
    • Disadvantages of a web form:
      • More reliant on good internet connectivity.
      • Our users feel less obliged to fill them out than they do to send email.
      • Can convey the incorrect notion that our system somehow manages the data; users may expect a way of directly viewing and re-entering past data, which is functionality we may not wish to provide.

  • Data validation/quality should generally be managed within the systems from which SELV+ pulls data. The SELV Dashboard should reflect the data which exists in these other systems - we never want to have a situation wherein the data in SELV+ differs from what's in the source  systems. Therefore, although SELV+ should allow a corrected dataset (eg: CSV file) to be re-uploaded into the system in bulk, we probably don't want or need to allow users/admins to make changes to individual pieces of data already introduced to the SELV Dashboard.
  • There are perhaps two classes of data obtained via email:

    1) data that's bulk downloaded from one system and emailed to us via a CSV file
    2) data that's manually entered by a user (like the trimestral info).

    Should the first category of data require a SELV+ administrator to review and subsequently add to the SELV Dashboard? Or, instead, should it be automatically added to the system when end-users submit it?

    Although we didn't reach a definitive answer, it sounds like there's desire to support both options. (It doesn't seem as though doing so should be hard.)
  • Even though SELV+ merely stores data that's in other systems, it would be wise to back it up. If its data were to somehow become corrupt, it may be very difficult to manually reconstruct the state of its database.

  • Ona sent us a proposal and thinks they can furnish much of the desired functionality by the end of June. Christine is working on the contract with them.

Action items