Custard Melt

The agenda was a straightforward one. Charlie Kronick from GP UK talked about the difficulties associated with coalition campaigning on climate change issues, in particular his experience with the Stop Climate Chaos coalition. For me the key takeaway from Charlie's talk was about the need to move climate change from being an issue talked about by small numbers of experts, in technical terms, in obscure meetings and make it something millions of people can understand and engage with.

Duncan from Thoughtworks briefly presented the agile development methodology (while saying some very nice things about Greenpeace). It was nice to be able to talk about the flexibility the methodology (and Django) gave us, especially when answering questions later on about future plans and 'does it do this?' type issues.

Finally, Rolf gave a guided tour of the demo version. I'm still getting used to working with Custard, but the ability to bounce around the system, setting up events, joining things together and adding keywords is truly impressive.

Questions focused on future development, branding, marketing, usability and questions about how ambitious we want to be, that kind of thing. Post event discussion threw up one idea that's got my mind racing. Multiple instances of Custard could syndicate content to each other based on keyword. So, if someone created a 'Fair Trade' website using Custard content from there including keywords like 'climate change' or 'emissions' could be consumed automatically by Melt, while content on Melt labelled 'WTO' or 'development' could go the other way.

The presentations can be found in the SVN repository.

Duncan / ThoughtWorks

Rolf / Greenpeace