Overview
While the coding has not yet begun, we have made significant progress over the past month in continuing to get pieces in place to strengthen the overall project and community effort. We continue to make frequent announcements on the blog and social media presences to share the status on various project fronts, so please consult those sources for more detail on issues outlined below.

Technical Team
Much of the past month’s technical effort has been spent on review and revision of specifications and hiring of staff. A revised specification document is now complete, along with basic use cases, and each will proceed in the next week forward into development of initial wireframes. In the area of staffing, one of two application developers began on 4/1 at CDL, and interviews continue to fill a second position. In addition, we now have a UI designer on-board at Purdue who will be working on the wireframe and UI aspects during this process. We are presently determining the best process for community review and feedback on technical specifications.

Communications/Outreach Team
The Sloan outreach coordinator position has been posted at UIUC and candidate review will begin 5/2. Both Researcher and Administrative User Advisory Boards are now fully composed, posted on the public website, and initial phone meetings are scheduled for May. Initial meetings will consist of a high-level project introduction and review of technical specifications and plans. The governance structure is now being implemented, and most of the originating institutions have signed the agreement already. We are just beginning the process of enrolling institutions currently setup with authentication to shift them to “Partner” status. We hope to get most of them onboard within a month.

Metrics
Nothing new to report. We have not yet fully settled on metrics for use in evaluating 1) project success or 2) impact of the new DMPTool. We have an extensive list produced at the kick-off meeting, but are still sorting and determining best choices. We plan to gather feedback from the advisory boards on this topic.

Overall Project
While we expect most of the work to be completed within 2013, final activities may carry into early 2014 given the delays experienced in receiving and processing awards at the main institutions, and the posting and hiring of several key positions.  We remain generally on track to finish within 12 months, considering the startup delay from receiving and processing awards at the main institutions. We are now beginning to move more smoothly.

-Andrew Sallans, University of Virginia Library, DMPTool2 Project Manager