MATURE has started with a high level of activity and motivation of all participants in April 2008 and has so far managed to sustain those high standards. The project work has been organized according to an adapted agile approach in different strands of activities, which have regular synchronization points (every three months, together with consortium meetings). These activities include

1. empirical work, focussing on ethnographic studies in the first year and deriving from them requirements for an adapted maturing model on the one hand, but also personas for guiding software development
2. conceptual work, clarifying, aligning, and deepening the understanding of the underlying conceptual model(s), such as knowledge maturing (process), guidance, personal learning & maturing environment, organizational learning & maturing environment, among others.
3. technical work, integrating, adapting, and developing further existing tools embedded into a participatory design philosophy, which means in close interaction with users and user representatives within the frame of design studies
4. evaluation, extending the formative evaluation approach to even earlier phases of the project in order to be able to draw sound conclusions from technical and conceptual work

Almost 50 persons from the consortium partners were involved in these activities, and we could also achieve mutual benefit from cooperation with a large part of our associate partner network already, such as the participation of GISA, Synaxon, Klinikum Karlsruhe, Connexions Kent & Medway, and Swisscom in the ethnographic studies, but also research collaboration like with Pforzheim University on organizational learning and human resource management.
In addition to that, MATURE has been very active in creating awareness about the project and its ideas and disseminating initial results by organizing events like the Learning in Enterprise 2.0 workshop at ECTEL 2008 and the OntoContent 2008 workshop at the OTM Federated Conferences 2008, and contributing to conferences like COOP 2008, I-KNOW 2008, or OnlineEduca 2008 in Berlin.
If you want to find out more: we have set up a results page on which we collect and continuously the preliminary outcome of the project.