Draft Blog Post

Observing a PANDA in its natural habitat

Coincident with our recent beta release, we went to the NICAR conference in St. Louis, where we helped almost two dozen PANDA servers enter the world in less than an hour. We took this as a good sign that we'd succeeded at making PANDA easy to install. These early users flushed out a couple of bugs--thank you for making PANDA better!

We also took advantage of the great number of potential users at NICAR to learn about high-priority features. One widely requested feature was column-based search. Users wanted to be able to search within a single column of a dataset for specific values and ranges, especially in number and date columns. We made implementing that feature the focus of a recent development iteration.

Today we are releasing an updated PANDA which fixes the bugs identified by our early users and delivers a new feature, typed search.

We've made a new installer, as well an easy-to-run upgrade process for existing PANDA installations. Please check it out, or upgrade your current install if you have one. We'll be watching the user mailing list, ready to answer your questions and get even more feedback from you.

While we're looking forward to learning more from people who've installed PANDA, we've learned quite a bit from the Chicago Tribune's rollout of the application. We had a series of meetings with editors and other staff to show them how to use the application. In the course of demonstrating and discussing PANDA, our insights and our community's reactions have lead us to update the prospective features list.

For example, as we explained to staff how we want them to use PANDA, we stressed the importance of replacing the default dataset title with something more clear and using the description field to explain the source of the data. In the course of these discussions, we realized that if this is so important, PANDA should make it easier for users to do the "right" thing. We'll evaluate the upload process and adjust the workflow to promote best practices.

The PANDA board will meet in-person soon for an intensive session of prioritizing features. If you're using PANDA already, we would love to hear more from you to help us focus development for the remaining months of our grant. Feel free to join us on the user mailing list!