Part 2 Metadata translation in detail
 
* When it's applied
* Architecture overview
* How to customize

As part of summing up and handing off the XNAT DICOM libraries, Kevin will be giving technical presentations on various aspects of DICOM in general and how DICOM is handled in XNAT.
 
Part 1
 
* Overview of DICOM and XNAT, talking enough about DICOM for the rest of it to make sense
* How we map DICOM to XNAT
* How DICOM flows into XNAT (applet, C-STORE, zip uploader)
* Digging into details of the Gradual DICOM Importer, identifiers, namers, prearchive

I'm testing out hangouts on air and streaming that to YouTube to replace the current WebEx-based XNAT developer teleconference. So don't be alarmed if I inadvertently share these with the public repeatedly. Sorry about the noise :)

Hello my IT development world friends (if you don't work in or run a software development group, you're free to ignore this from here on out!),

We've been thinking about instituting a hack day or innovation day program here in the lab. The basic idea is that, one day a month or one week a year or something like that, each developer gets some time to go off and work on whatever takes their fancy. Basic research type development, it may have applications with our work or it may not, but it's just whatever you feel like doing.

What I'm wondering is whether any of you guys have any experience with these in your development organizations? I just have some questions about what works and what doesn't work:

* What kind of time frame do you use? Like I said we thought about one day a month, but that might be too little time to really get deep on something and get anything done. So one week a year would definitely give you deep-dive time, but is it too infrequent?

* Is there any accountability or connection back to the group? I mean, I do think that it's great to say, go do whatever the hell you want, but should we at least require a report back to the group in the form of a brown-bag presentation or something?

* Should it be TOTALLY free-form or does it make sense to require some connection, however tenuous, back to our work in the lab? E.g., someone wants to work on a tablet application, so they have to say, well, it's a tablet application for creating forms for clinical research data entry. Or fuck it, I wrote a tablet application that plays fart sounds when you poke a picture of an ass? No connection to our work, but we now have some tablet development skills in the lab.

We definitely want this to be super light-weight and focused on our developers getting opportunities to develop new skills. We don't pay particularly well and we don't have much in the way of funds for professional training courses, but we have lots of flexibility in how we allocate our resources, so it seems like a great way to compensate for the other things we can't provide. But by the same token I also want to make sure we aren't wasting precious developer hours that could go to project work.

Feedback is much appreciated!