The development of the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) international accessibility infrastructure is progressing apace. Our work in the EC FP7 Cloud4All (C4A) project has just completed its 3rd year and achieved a successful review. The sibling project, Prosperity4All (P4A), is currently preparing for its 1st review. With this solid background and with funding from the Universal Interface and Information Technology Access RERC (UIITA-RERC) at the Trace Center we have started to work on a couple of cross project activities, namely Contributor “on boarding” and the Tiger Team
The research activity taking place in the Cloud4All 
and Prosperity4All EC FP7 projects is the critical seed for the wider game plan for making the GPII a solid reality. The vision is for a vibrant ecosystem of accessibility users and developers working to co-create resources, tools and services that are effective in getting the best possible solutions into the hands of users.
In order for this to work in a sustainable way we need to have a healthy community of people who are excited, engaged and contributing to the effort. Some folks may provide funding and others their time, either paid or not. We need this to happen in all areas of the GPII activity, including the areas we are currently working as funded research. For example, the Automatic Personalisation for Preferences being developed in cloud for all will only be successful when a majority of solutions work with it so users can select and use them. Also, the Developer Space in Prosperity4All will be successful when developers regard it as the place to go for making their solutions full accessible.
So we have to activities of Raising the Floor that are designed to play a part in encouraging a active community.
Contributors
Since Gregg Vanderheiden first started telling people about the GPII people have become excited about it and offered their help or asked how their solutions can work with it. In fact, we have already attracted over 130 people who have expressed such an interest. However, we have not been in a position to help these people easily get on board and contribute their skills in any organised fashion.
So we are starting to create resources that ease the “on boarding” process. These are currently on the wiki Contributor’s Emporium page but will move to a website based on the C4A site with some info on the P4A websites. We are also working with the P4A dissemination team to send a newsletter in order collect contributor interests and provide them with project news updates. We also have a new Contributors mailing list (google group) for discussion.
Naturally we welcome contributions and ideas from everyone involved in the current projects. In particular, we request that during our work we all consider
- Ways to incorporate contributions from others into your work
- Provide clear documentation suitable for people outside your workgroup
- Mark selected issues as ‘Suitable for Contributors’
Tiger Team
The Tiger Team is a small group of Raising the Floor members tasked with shepherding the GPII from research outputs to production infrastructure. Initially we are concentrating on increasing the number of solutions that work with the GPII architecture for Automatic Personalisation from Preferences (from C4A). This architecture has been carefully designed to ease the process of making solutions GPII-enabled. Indeed, in many cases the effort required is to provide configuration information to the architecture. Still, the work needs to be done, ideally with the solution developer’s support so the Tiger Team are leading this work.
This work, funded by UIITA-RERC, is also one example of where contributors can play a part and we naturally welcome input from all current project members. For example you might suggest solutions to work on, provide documentation or otherwise help the growth of the GPII. We hold an open team meeting every week.
Join us
If any of this interests you then do please get in contact at contibutorcoord@gpii.net. We look forward to working with you on this.