Yesterday I was in Paris with Simon Rycroft and Dave Roberts to meet with a team from the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) project. EOL generates mixed feels amongst many taxonomists, but part of the project that I have always supported is their "LifeDesk" component. LifeDesks are EOL's equivalent of the Scratchpads. When initially released, LifeDesks are likely to have less functionality than the Scratchpads, but should be more robust thanks to the greater resources EOL have to throw at them. LifeDesks use the same underlying Content Management System (Drupal) as the Scratchpads, and the goal of the meeting was to find a way of integrating our work such that we could benefit from each others development activities.

We agreed to cooperate in a number of areas (specimen and taxonomy management, matrix editing of content, and in the longer term a character editor along the lines of Rod Page's NDE) with a view toward the possibility of long term integration of the two projects. The details of this agreement are outlined in letter we rather called grandly called "The Paris Declaration." The letter is still being drafted, but should result in benefits for current Scratchpad users, and future LifeDesk users. The first evidence of this will hopefully be in our use of David Shorthouse's excellent taxonomy editor, which is a vast improvement over our current taxonomy management tools. All going well, the new taxonomy manager will be available to users when we start rolling the next version of the Scratchpads. At the moment Simon is undertaking the heroic task of upgrading all our modules to Drupal 6 (currently the Scratchpads use Drupal 5). We are hoping this will be complete by March, and we will gradually migrate the current sites across, taking care to do this slowly to stave off any problems. We now have over 1,000 users so this has to be done carefully!

In preparation for the meeting I put together a development plan for the Scratchpads to help us identify common areas of interest. This plan is very much a draft. It contains a mix of things we have already done and tasks still to do, some of which will take us well into 2010 and beyond. The diagram needs some refinement and additional information. Nevertheless, it is something we can build on: