In December last year, two Liip employees Brian King & I (Penny Leach) went to the Czech Republic for a week, for the first ever concentrated Moodle Developer Conference. There were 16 attendees from around the world, participating in an intense week of discussion about the upcoming Moodle 2.0 release, with a lot of decisions being made and work being planned. The session notes are now online.

After that, I had a 6 week secondment to Moodle HQ, working on improving the Moodle Networking feature for Moodle 2.0. This was my second secondment to Moodle HQ, the first was in 2008, to work on the Portfolio API. Moodle HQ is based in Perth Australia, but there are employees working all around the world in different timezones, so communication largely happens on our jabber development chat, and bug tracker, with the occasional skype video chat.

The first step was to evaluate the current state of MNet, which was added to Moodle 1.8, but needed a lot of work to bring it up to Moodle 2.0 compliance. I created a metabug with a number of subtasks representing the different areas that need work, and then linked all the existing MNet bugs to those. Then I created a whole lot more bugs for a lot of refactoring that needed to happen. Then I rolled up my sleeves and started work. I closed many bugs, some of which affected the stable 1.9 version of Moodle as well, and will be in the next stable point release.

Unfortunately there was more needing to be done than I had time to do, but MNet is now in a much better state to be able to be maintained by more people. I will be doing a handover meeting with David Mudrák soon, and also of course continue to help with bug triage and fixing during the Moodle 2.0 beta period.

Technically, I was tracking Moodle cvs with git, making branches for each bug I was working on, committing to git and then eventually rebasing and using git-cvsexportcommit to land the work into the relevant Moodle branch. This is a workflow that David has recently described in more detail, and works very well for me, a long time thoroughly convinced git user.

Working with Moodle HQ directly is always a great experience, although doing it in a European timezone, as I did in 2008, works better than doing it from New Zealand, which is where I was this time. Even so, I had as always great support from the other core team, testing and doing code review. I hope MNet users will be happy with the improvements in Moodle 2.0.

This Wednesday and Thursday I'm going to be at the Swiss Open Expo, "manning" the Mahara stand. Liip are always in heavy presence at the Open Expo, but this time will be the first time we have a Mahara stand, so it's pretty exciting!

If you're in or around Winterthur and interested in Open Source e-portfolios, come and say hi!

Finally, I am very happy to annouce that I will soon be working on adding LEAP2A support to the Moodle Portfolio API that will be in Moodle 2.0.

There's already a rough specification for this work, and it's been on my TODO list for a very long time.

LEAP2A is a very simple and open atom-based e-portfolio standard, to promote interoperability between e-portfolio systems. Interoperability is very important in an e-portfolio system, because it is vital to be able to transport portfolio data around with you, as you move between educational providers, into higher education, and on to professional development. Imagine having in one portfolio system, your entire portfolio of work, starting from your first day at primary school, right up to your continued professional development. Of course, one would use many different portfolio systems over that time, so some sort of open standard to transport data around is imperative.

I was involved with the LEAP standard group last year when I was living in London, adding LEAP2A support to Mahara. I attended the LEAP meetings in the UK, and worked on the export side of the project. Nigel took over when I left Catalyst and continued, adding the import side (which is of course, much harder).

But wait, you ask. Isn't Moodle a learning management system, not an e-portfolio? Why do we care about interoperability with an e-portfolio standard? The answer is of course, that while you're working, you are entering data into Moodle, and at the end of the course, the natural thing to want to do is to export some of that data into your portfolio. At the moment, we have the Portfolio API in Moodle for that, which I worked on for last year for 3 months, during my time at Moodle HQ. However, at the time I wrote it, it wasn't at all clear what portfolio standard we should support, so content is transferred in "raster" format (rendered to HTML or a file like a pdf). Since then though, LEAP has emerged as a clear front runner, and now that Mahara 1.2 (almost released!) fully supports importing and exporting LEAP2A, the time is right for us to take the plunge and add LEAP2A support to Moodle's Portfolio API. This improves the integration between Moodle and Mahara, as well as opening the door for Moodle to integrate better with other e-portfolio systems that implement the LEAP2A standard.

I am therefore very grateful to the State of New Hampshire for providing the funding to Liip for me to do this work. This comes from a grant from the New Hampshire Department of Education, and a collaborate group made up of the following school districts:

• Exeter Region Cooperative
• Windham
• Oyster River
• Farmington
• Newmarket
• Timberlane

Special thanks also to Matt Oquist who has been tirelessly helping me find funding for this work!

I am happy to announce that Liip are now a Mahara partner! Mahara is an Open Source ePortfolio system.

In many respects Mahara is a "sister" application to Moodle, providing students with a learning environment that they themselves own, giving them them the ability to showcase their work and collaborate with their peers. However, Mahara is also well suited as a social networking system, running out of the box without Moodle.

Mahara was originally funded by the New Zealand government's Tertiary Education Commission, and has grown into a thriving open source product that is increasingly being adopted worldwide. It makes a lot of sense for Liip to be a partner, both because we're already the official Moodle partner in Switzerland, and Mahara fits very well into our existing list of projects we work with, but also because I have been involved in Mahara since the start, and wanted to continue my involvement since coming to Liip. Liip have been fantastic supporting me in this goal!

I was lucky enough to attend the Best of Swiss Web award night last Thursday night, as Liip was up for a number of awards. We definitely cleaned up, winning one bronze, two silver, one gold, and the overall Master of Swiss Web award for the Gottago project.

It was a great night, lots of essen and trinken and fun all around.

However, one thing really stuck out and annoyed me so much I feel compelled to write a blog post about it (after a dry spell of almost two months!), which was the Women Wired in Web award, a special category for women only.

The first point is - I don't think there should be a special category for women. Women are perfectly capable of achieving excellence in the internet industry, just as much as men, and having a special category for projects where there was a majority of women working on them (I assume this is the criteria) just says that we are sub-standard and need our own category. This is not to say that I don't think there are unique difficulties that are faced by women but not men in the IT industry in general - I do. More on this later.

Secondly - what about all the men that worked on the winning project? The women all got to get up on stage to receive their award, and the men at their table all gallantly stood up and clapped for them - but surely they were thinking a little bit, "I worked on that project too, just as hard, yet I don't get any recognition of it".

Thirdly - during the conversation (which I didn't understand, because it was Swiss German) between the MC and the woman introducing this award, the entire female jury panel got up on stage to receive applause and accolades. This didn't happen for any other category - none of the other judging panels got up on stage, so why did these women get to?

The prize in the Swiss Web awards is a (dispatched by pretty girls) spray painted baywatch buoy, for reasons utterly beyond me. They are spray painted the colour of the award - so the gold awards are gold, etc. The Women Wired in Web award was Purple. This in itself made me cross as well, but I guess at least it wasn't pink. Either way, at my table it was quickly dubbed "The Vagina Prize".

All in all - I think the event was sexist. Women haven't fought to become a second class of citizen who need a special award prize, we should be equals. Creating a special category for women just sends the opposite message that we're not equals.

Back to my point about women in IT in general. I still believe it can be a lot harder for young girls, getting in to the industry, without the confidence that comes with experience. I look back on myself a few years ago and I'm still shocked at some of the things that I've seen, and how defensive and insecure I was. However, there is a right and wrong way to approach dealing with this. Wrong is just endlessly bitching about, and consequently amplifying, the problem. Wrong is also telling women they need a special (professional!) category to receive an award for their work. The best thing to do is to show young girls that there are strong female role models - that, yes, it can be hard, but it's certainly possible, and that there's a huge list of women out there who they can look to for advice and support. The talk Pia Waugh gave at LCA last year about the (female) Heroes of Open Source is an excellent example of the sort of positive, empowering way this problem can be addressed.

Here's my general update of what's happened over the last few months of completely shifting my life around.

I'm living in Fribourg, Switzerland. This is a really cute little town, just 20 minutes train ride from the capital, Bern. I think it's supposed to be officially French-German bilingual but it really isn't. French is the language spoken in all the shops and cafes. I don't have any French yet, so this has been a bit of a challenge - the lowest point was trying to buy the official Rubbish bags at the supermarket.

It took quite awhile to find an apartment - I think I looked at between 20 and 25 altogether before I found a perfect apartment just over a bridge from the fringe of town - I'm living in a renovated apartment in an old house on the river bank and it's absolutely perfect. I can hear the bells from the cathedral and I have a good walk to work, 35 minutes, and there's grass and river and a bus stop outside for the mornings where I take longer than normal to get up. I found a vegetable market just over the bridge on Saturday mornings, that has a whole stall dedicated to mushrooms! This made me disproportionately gleeful. After almost a month of looking at apartments that I didn't want, I visited the apartment, signed the contract, moved in, and bought & assembled most of the furniture within a single weekend, with the help of my amazing boyfriend. Apparently this is almost unheard of in Switzerland.

I'm working at Liip, and it's great. I cannot imagine being thrown into a better bunch of people in a foreign city/country/language. I'm working on Moodle, doing some Open Source projects, working with great people, drinking a lot of beer and throwing the pony around. This is not a euphemism! I got to be a part of the group celebrating Liip doing so well at the Best of Swiss Web awards (more on this in another post), and it was just awesome to watch my new work people excel at what they do.

I went to the German Moodlemoot in Bamberg last month and had a great time (finally getting to try the Moodle Mojitos) and met some more Moodlers for the first time - most notably Heinz, who it was fantastic to meet, and David, who dutifully bought me beer for helping him with git, as well as seeing the familiar faces of Martin, Helen and Petr, which always makes me happy. For the first time I was at a conference and people who weren't me talking about Mahara (although of course I talked about Mahara as well), and that was a pretty big buzz in itself.

I love Swiss trains! Travelling back from Bamberg I changed about 4 times, and the change that made me switch onto a Swiss train made me warm and fuzzy. I also like Spätzle, Lindor chocolate, Cardinal (my local beer), Coop, Olivenbrot, the pizza place near work, Lily's, and Freitag (I am happily telling everyone I'm Swiss now that I have a Freitag wallet, which is complete nonsense). lost.ch makes me happy, having my name on my letterbox makes me happy (this does not happen in New Zealand). My boyfriend makes me happy. Inappropriately appending 'chen' or 'li' on the end of everything makes me gleeful and drives everyone else crazy. So far, I don't think much of Cablecom, Migros, apartment hunting, eating Pferd (pony!) or endless dairy products.

I have seen live: Gazpacho twice (although once was in München) and Explosions in the Sky. I hate smoking in bars, but I loved both bands.

As soon as I have conquered German and French (any day now: yeah right!) I will be completely happy.