Wednesday’s open meeting was, as UpStage meetings often are, liberally interspersed with spontaneous performance moments, laughter and bug demonstrations. There was also plenty of serious talk and those who want the full story can read the log here.

In summary, the meeting discussed:

• the new media management system (also known as the nmms or “shirly” because “new media management system” is too long to keep typing over & over again): eagerly anticipated for some months, this exciting development is almost ready and we will begin testing it next week. It will streamline the process of uploading and assigning media to stages, and make it much easier for you to find a particular media item. If you are interested in helping us test it, please contact us. This release will also include a number of bug fixes and some minor enhancements such as a player/audience counter that is visible to the audience.
• the manual: this will require a major update when shirly (nmms) is released, so this is a good time to also transfer the whole thing to FLOSS Manuals. For those of you who don’t know FLOSS Manuals, this is a great online software manual repository which allows multiple people to participate in the ongoing editing and updating of manuals. This means that you too can contribute to the UpStage manual – contact us if you are interested.
• the installer: the latest version of the installer package (v2.4b) is now available from SourceForge. We are very interested to hear from anyone who wants to install this on their server. Ultimately there will also be an installation manual on FLOSS Manuals so we are also looking for help with creating that. Any feedback about the installer is helpful.
• documentation: Francesco Buonaiuto has volunteered to document everything that happens in UpStage this year. He will do his best to record all performances and meetings, and he is also interested in compiling documentation about the processes of developing shows in UpStage, as an archive and for future research. Please email Francesco if you would like to add material to the collection, or if you want to help with this work.

We talked about other features that we would like to see developed in the future; there is a feature tracker on SourceForge where people are welcome to add ideas and suggestions. Remember that UpStage’s development is currently unfunded, so these things will only become a reality if/when someone volunteers to do it; if you might be that volunteer, you are warmly invited to join the developers’ list and volunteer yourself.

There is also a bug tracker on SourceForge, so if you encounter a bug in UpStage you can see whether or not it’s something that’s already being investigated. You can add your information – bugs can be very hard to replicate and pin down, so the more information we have about them the better. You can also log a new bug, or email us, if you encounter a problem that isn’t already in the bug tracker.

Thanks very much to everyone who came to the meeting or emailed about it. We’re looking forward to an active year with your enthusiastic involvement.