CUCC Expedition Handbook

Troggle - the users

Troggle runs much of the the cave survey data management, presents the data on the website and manages the Expo Handbook.

Who needs to know What and When

We have several quite different sorts of cavers who interact with troggle:

• The youthful hard caver, who is trained in underground survey techniques but whose interest is limited to handing over the grubby survey notes when she emerges into daylight. Is keen to know how many km of cave she surveyed each year and to see pretty drawn-up surveys (done by someone else). Walks through walls.
• The surface walker who is happy to do route-finding over the plateau, takes lots of photos of cave entrances and cavers enjoying sunshine and may sometimes be able to provide GPS tracks of where he has been. He needs a prospecting guide to find previously identified entrances and be able to find photos of caves in past years. Writes up his explorations in execrable handwriting in the logbook. Looks at walls.
• The diligent student who types up the survey notes into survex file format, transcribes sketch notes onto survex centre-lines, and uses Therion to produce beautiful survey graphics of the caves he has digitised - but who is not a computer geek and whose brain oozes out of his ears when Wookey explains what git is. Applies artistic graffiti to walls.
• The archivist who takes the survex files, the therion files, the GPS files, the scanned survex centrelines and files them in the right places on the expo laptop, uses the troggle reports to help ensure that these are consistent and are filed correctly. Uses troggle input forms to "create new cave" in the system and adds to the directory structures to match the recently discovered caves. Is learning git. When transcribing bad handwriting in logbook (or struggling with git), climbs walls.
• Nerdus maximus: talks python in his sleep and can rebase a hairy git branch without error after 7 bottles of Gosser. Painfully averse to writing documentation. Overstressed, over-caffeinated and with a tendency to mutter that it's all obvious. Oblivious to walls.

These are some of the "use cases" for which troggle needs to be (re)designed to cope with.