I was at a meeting with the director of the U of A Students’ Union‘s Advocacy Department last night, discussing ways for Advocacy to use dub5 to schedule work, develop metrics, and do on-the-fly meeting changes. It was a terrific sit-down, and I’d like to thank Chris for taking the time to chat with me, and for his enthusiasm and awesome ideas as well.
While we were sitting there eating our dinner, I received an email from Jeffu, dub5′s resident Programmer-in-Chief™. It was some of the best news I’d read in a long time. As I mentioned in the previous post, we’ve hired some interns and staff at dub5 to help ease us through the treacherous waters of development. Tim, one of our newest team members, has successfully completely our SMS integration:
Tiny Tim*’s been working furiously (and I do mean furious) on SMS integration. We’re in the process of having all of our SMS infrastructure switched over from our current “hamster server” to a proper sms aggregator complete with a short code. This means that people will receive texts from 2DUB5 (23825) and should result in a much more reliable service. We’re also CWTA compliant, which means if someone wants to block us from sending them texts, we will most happily comply.
That brings us a step further along in our development process — a critical step as well. We no longer have to worry about our “pay-as-you-go” SIM modem running out of money and people failing to receive text message reminders!
On the business development front, I met with the U of A Ski club before Reading Week, and fleshed out a spec document for them, and I’ve also been in discussions with the UASU’s VP (Student Life) and the Assistant VP aboutusing dub5 to coordinate volunteers, and large-scale events on campus. I’ll have more on that once the specification documents have been written and approved. We’re also beginning the process of speaking with a national student organization, encouraging them to use dub5 to coordinate some of their conferences and meetings that take place in Ottawa. I’ll have more on that as things develop.
Note that I am much taller than Tim. And I carry a Klingon bat’leth on me at all times.