10.31.2007 Pachyderm Council Plans 2.1 Release
The Pachyderm Council worked this week to finalize the specification for work to be done on the 2.1.0 release of Pachyderm. The specification will be released on
PachyForge in early November, and a call for developers will go out to the Pachyderm community shortly after that. The Council is currently working on the timeline for the release of 2.1.0, which will include new templates, code fixes, and an upgrade path for 2.0 installations.
10.22.2007 New Community Website in Development
A new website designed to serve the Pachyderm community--both users and developers--is in development. A joint effort of Pachyderm Council Chair, Scott Sayre, and lead developer Joshua Archer, PachyForge will host discussion forums, list current Pachyderm installations, and serve as a focal point to bring the community together.
PachyForge is scheduled for official release in November 2007, but is available now for those who want a preview.
09.25.2007 2007 Pachyderm Conference Opens Today in Dallas, Texas
The second annual
Pachyderm
Users Conference opened today in Dallas, Texas. The focus of the Pachyderm Conference is to bring together authors, developers, and others in an ongoing conversation about how to communicate effectively with digital media. This year's conference features keynotes by Scott Sayre and Susan Chun, special luncheon sessions by Holly Witchey and Kris Wetterlund, and a slate of breakout sessions on topics from best practices to current Pachyderm work at a variety of organizations.
05.10.2007 Five Institutions Receive Pachyderm Servers Under Marcus Foundation Grant
Under the auspices of the Edward and Betty Marcus Digital Education Project for
Texas Art Museums, five Texas institutions received Pachyderm servers this week.
Recipients include the University of Texas at Austin and the Blanton Museum of
Art; Texas Tech University; the University of North Texas; the University of
Houston; and the University of Texas at Arlington. The servers will be used to
create digital storytelling projects at the universities and their associated
museums.
03.05.2007 Pachyderm to Visit MW2007
Pachyderm will return to the exhibit hall at Museums and the Web this year! Like last year, attendees will get to see the product close-up and find out how they can use this authoring and publishing tool in their museums.
02.07.2007 NMC to Work on Installation Issues
The New Media Consortium today announced plans to continue working on the Pachyderm installation package, with the aim of making it easier to install. Work is to take place from March through May, 2007.
01.16.2007 Pachyderm Connects with the Steve Project
Work has begun on a prototype template that will connect Pachyderm with the powerful tagging and search capability of the
Steve Project. Developers from both teams are working together on this proof-of-concept integration project.
12.12.2006 First Pachyderm Users' Conference Opens Today
The first annual Pachyderm Users' Conference opened today in Austin, Texas. This groundbreaking meeting brings together museum and campus leaders, trustees, and educators for a series of dialogs with Pachyderm authors, developers, members of the open source community, students, museum experts, and the Marcus Foundation Board to discuss the outreach and programmatic use of Pachyderm in museums and institutions of higher education. While examples from many disciplines will be featured, a special emphasis will be placed this year on examples from the arts and arts education.
10.03.2006 Pachyderm Moves Fully into Open Source
Pachyderm is officially an entirely open-source project! Work on the grant-funded project has concluded, but the project is alive and well and development continues as project partners and others pick up where the project left off. In the works are crosswalks to collections management systems, new templates, and more!
08.16.2006 Pachyderm Advisory Council Holds First Meeting
The first meeting of the inaugural Pachyderm Advisory Council (PAC) was held via teleconference on August 16, 2006. Topics included best practices for open source development, the PAC charter, the status of current Pachyderm installations, the state of the application, and next steps. The second meeting has been scheduled for late September, with a possible third in November and another to coincide with the first Pachyderm Users Conference coming up in December.
07.27.2006 Pachyderm Goes International
At the end of July 2006, Pachyderm has nearly 1,000 authors from over 275 organizations in eleven countries. Two-thirds of these are educational organizations and museums. Pachyderm authors can be found in Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
05.25.2006 Preliminary Results of Usability Study Released
A usability study focused on Pachyderm's media upload and management capabilities was just completed at Rochester Institute of Technology. Preliminary results revealed Pachyderm has a high appeal to users – nine of ten would recommend Pachyderm to a friend or colleague – and suggested potential areas for further development, including the ability to browse media and a "my media" section. The tests also demonstrated that media upload in Pachyderm is an easy process to learn. The completed report will be posted in the
Document Archive when it is released.
05.18.2006 Pachyderm Presentations at NMC Summer Conference
The Pachyderm development team will be presenting at the NMC Summer Conference in Cleveland next month. Sessions will include a hands-on preconference workshop, a product launch event, and a co-session with the Open Knowledge Initiative of MIT to discuss repository asset integration work and related issues.
05.12.2006 First Marcus Digital Education Project Training Held
The first of six three-day intensive trainings was held this week in Austin, Texas. Staff from the
Center for Digital Storytelling, the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the
New Media Consortium conducted the workshop. Staff from nine Texas museums were in attendance, and each group left with a partially-completed presentation featuring works from their own collections or exhibitions. Five more trainings are planned in Austin, Houston, and Dallas. The project, which aims to facilitate the user of new digital tools in Texas museums, is supported by the Edward and Betty Marcus Foundation.
04.12.2006 Multi-Platform Pachyderm Installations
Installations of Pachyderm are up and running on Mac, Windows, and Linux servers at several institutions. New installs are planned for several museums and universities in the next few months.
03.29.2006 Pachyderm Showcase Opens
The Pachyderm Showcase is open! Filled with examples of the range of creative work that is being done with Pachyderm right now, the Showcase demonstrates how students, teachers, professionals, and others are applying Pachyderm in a variety of disciplines. Visit the
Showcase to see these inspiring examples!
03.24.2006 Pachyderm Visits Museums and the Web 2006
Last year, Pachyderm went to
Museums and the Web in alpha form; this year, it was showcased at a
booth in the exhibit space. Attendees got a close look at the product and learned how
they can use this new open source authoring and publishing tool in their museums.
03.22.2006 Pachyderm Presented at CATS 2006
Pachyderm: A Rich Media Learning Object Authoring Application was presented today at CATS 2006. The session included a demonstration of Pachyderm and showcased the results of graduate research which placed Pachyderm in a collaborative environment with graduate students and educators as participants. The results represent a fresh educational approach to Pachyderm and demonstrate Pachyderm's use in an explicitly educational context. The presentation materials will be available online at the CATS 2006 conference website.
03.22.2006 Pachyderm Code Available on SourceForge
The Pachyderm project continues its transition to open source this week; the Pachyderm code is now available on SourceForge.net. Developers who wish to see the code may check it out using Subversion. The packaged releases are not yet available, but should be coming soon. See the
Pachyderm Project page on SourceForge for more information.
02.06.2006 Marcus Digital Education Project Underway
The Marcus Digital Education Project for Texas Museums, a special project funded by the Edward and Betty Marcus Foundation, is underway. Its aim is to facilitate the use of new digital tools in Texas art museums to help tell media-rich stories about the museums’ collections and exhibitions. Museum participants in the project receive training in digitizing media, digital storytelling, and Pachyderm, helping them to create detailed stories about their holdings and shows.
01.09.2006 Pachyderm 90-Day Trial Accounts Available
Pachyderm 90-day trial authoring accounts are currently available on request for those who wish to take Pachyderm for a test drive. For more information, please see
About Pachyderm. To request an account, please send email to
info@nmc.org.
11.02.2005 Pachyderm 2.0 Released to NMC
Pachyderm 2.0 is currently in release as a server-hosted, browser-based authoring platform running on servers provided by the New Media Consortium to its membership. Authoring accounts are currently available on request for up to 10 staff at any NMC insitution, or Pachyderm project partner institution. Free 90-day demonstration accounts will be available to non-NMC members in January 2006. For more information, please see
About Pachyderm.
10.24.2005 Final Pachyderm Beta Opened Today
This afternoon, Pachyderm's final beta test opened. Over 250 beta testers will put Pachyderm through its paces this week in a final pre-release test.
10.20.2005 Pachyderm's Final Beta Release Opens Monday
Pachyderm is faster, more stable, and easier to use than ever! The final beta release of Pachyderm, situated on the production server, will open Monday, October 24, 2005. This full-featured, hosted version of Pachyderm is very close to the final product, which will be available for download and installation free of charge in January, 2006.
9.14.2005 Pachyderm.org Domain Purchased
The project has secured the domain www.pachyderm.org, where all things Pachyderm will now be housed! A production server is currently being established which will be the site for the final beta tests before Pachyderm is released.
07.20.2005 Feature-Complete Beta Opens
The final round of beta testing opened July 20, 2005. The version of Pachyderm being tested in this round includes all features that will be in the version released this fall. Over 100 new beta testers have joined the Pachyderm Community with this round of testing.
06.16.2005 Pachyderm Presented at NMC Summer Conference
Pachyderm was presented at the NMC Summer Conference in Honolulu, HI, June 16, 2005. The session included an overview of the work process thus far and a live authoring demonstration.
04.14.2005 Pachyderm Presented at Museums & the Web 2005
Three Pachyderm papers were accepted for presentation at Museums & the Web 2005, held in Vancouver, B.C. The presentation marks the introduction of Pachyderm 2.0 to the museum community and included an invitation to join the second beta group (June, 2005). For more information about MW2005, see the
conference website.
04.13.2005 Apache License Selected for Pachyderm
The Apache open-source license has been selected as the license under which Pachyderm 2.0 will be released this fall. The
full text of the Apache license is available on
The Open Source Initiative website.
03.09.2005 Pachyderm 2.0 Is in Beta!
Pachyderm 2.0 is in beta! The first round of testing among Pachyderm Partners opened on March 1, 2005. Testers have access to the newly redesigned authoring system and are able to upload their own media files (including videos and images), author with five different templates, and publish their presentations.
The call for applications for beta testers went out to the NMC community as well. Beta testers will help to spot usability issues and bugs before the Pachyderm multimedia authoring tool is released this fall. Testers will become part of the Pachyderm community and will help shape the final form of this exciting content development platform.
For more information on the beta tests, please see the section for Pachyderm Testers.
02.09.2005 The New System Shapes Up
Development is progressing rapidly, with the team concentrating efforts on finding and fixing bugs prior to the first beta release. The publishing process is now more streamlined; the new user interface for the authoring system is in place; asset management
is functioning; and SWF generation of assets is now working as well.
01.15.2005 Template Team Focuses on Requirements
With the most of the templates built out in Flash MX and using XML data files (ten of the thirteen templates have now been drafted), the team has begun a thorough review of requirements dealing with the look and functionality of each template. The requirements review included reprioritizing possible changes based on need and time available.
12.03.2004 Pachyderm Team Meets in San Francisco
The team met for a three-day intensive work session in San Francisco in early December. Key outcomes included reframing the media management process, launching the documentation phase of the project, evaluating the project schedule, and identifying remaining development tasks. Bob Regan (Macromedia) spoke to the group about Flash and accessibility.
11.03.2004 Interface Design Session Held at SFMOMA
Key designers on the development team met today at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to hammer out the asset management portion of the authoring interface. Designs from the meeting are coming to life in the new interface mockups and will soon be coded into the system by the development team. Next to tackle for the interface team is the presentation management section; designs for template authoring are nearly finalized.
10.26.2004 Proof-of-Concept Prototype Completed
The development team announced a successful proof-of-concept prototype that encompasses the process of authoring and publishing from start to finish. Using one of the twelve templates, this prototype paves the way for further development and integration of the other templates.
09.14.2004 User Preference Tests Inform Interface Design
User preference tests were conducted among faculty and staff to direct the interface design effort. Two types of interface were shown: a drag-and-drop, preview-as-you-go, multi-pane design, and a forms-based, step-by-step design. As a result, the interface will combine the best of both designs, incorporating drag-and-drop and preview capabilities but keeping the simplicity of the forms-based design. For complete details please see the User Preference Test document.
09.13.2004 Successful Work Session Held in Calgary
Using Extreme Programming techniques, where teams of programmers collaborate simultaneously on a single chunk of code, the Calgary-based team and part of the CDL team made significant progress on the framework for Pachyderm 2.0. Part of the time was spent rethinking the database schemas to simplify and condense them where possible, which will enable later extension and adaptation of the presentation models. Progress was also made on the proof-of-concept prototype.
08.09.2004 Development Team Meets at CDL for 4-Day Work Session
The development team came together to plan its next steps, get an overview of the APOLLO system, and discuss the system architecture diagram. The team also used the time together to work through issues and brainstorm solutions. An unexpected, but very welcome outcome of the meeting is a method to create a template that will easily allow branding, or "skinning," of presentations by authors. The documentation team also sketched out a preliminary list of needs.
