Chunk #14 — Building and Supporting the REDCap Consortium: A Phased Approach — Phase 3: Creating a Small Consortium of Partners (4–10 sites; ~ 2006–2008)
The Vanderbilt team grew to include a full-time programmer and a part-time consortium support staff member (25%) in addition to the REDCap faculty lead, who began to focus on higher-level management of the project. The team hosted a weekly webinar via Skype to check the status of implementation across all partner sites, organize site-to-site help and support where appropriate, and discuss interesting use cases, end-user training, researcher marketing methods, challenges, and new feature requests. Partners provided weekly reports of site evaluation metrics (e.g., number of projects, research end users) and meeting summary reports were distributed via e-mail immediately after the weekly calls. When applicable, developers exchanged code through direct file transfers (e.g., e-mailed zip files) and maintained rudimentary versioning via weekly (or as-needed) REDCap software releases.
