Martin Dougiamas

Most humans couldn't either.  That question assumes you speak English AND know what a steeplechase is.

The Gradebook working group is not a developer meeting.  It was a user meeting to brainstorm and collate features.  These are documented in MDL-44673 (specs are still being improved).

For those worried about the larger changes I can reassure people that:

• they are much better thought-out than the docs show in their current state
• the bigger ones will be put up as prototypes on the prototype site for further feedback before they get into core.  It is very hard to really understand them without the prototypes, and so I think some of the discussion now is not helpful for anyone.
  

Yep, that pretty much mirrors my own wishlist, Chris    The current design is not actually limited to whole courses, you can specify any subset of activities in the backup.   But the interface sucks, at the moment.   I'd love a two-pane interface where you browse the hub on one side and drag things into your course on the other.

BTW: did you know xPlor was originally first developed at Moodlerooms some years ago for Moodle?

In fact "General Import Format Technology" is actually correct, it was Paul Shew who came up with that.  I thought it was a bit too generic however (it could also describe XML) so we never really published it that way.  And yeah it's cool how formats spread.