backpass.org

new monitor, originally uploaded by matt_jukes.

OK so I have settled in to my new office at the Hub (just in time to have to move in a couple of weeks time!) and have also finally got my work station pretty much set up.

I am using a 2 monitor (ish) set up with my Macbook and a seperate 20″ monitor - and despite my original plan all my communications channels are taking up all the space on my big monitor (as you can see from the pic above!) and my actual ‘work’ stuff is on the 13″ Macbook screen! Thing is Skype is closed at this point as well…so far it seems to be working so I’ll stick to this set up for a while - but I think I can see another (bigger) monitor in my future!

OK so the JISC Conference 2008 was on Tuesday and its taken a day or 2 for me to recover - though mainly due to celebratory activities post-conference (though I am not alone as one or 2 members of the JISC Comms team and at least one member of First Great Western staff will testify to!).

The JISC Conference is a massive undertaking and I’m not sure people realise just how much work goes into such a short event.  Planning for JISC09 starts on Monday!  This will continue for the entire year with a number of really hectic period long before the conference.  The 3Gs of Greg, Grace and Georgia will have the conference in the back of their minds pretty much permanently - and as someone who had a few years of that I both don’t envy them but have every confidence they’ll do another amazing job.

This year, with the help of MultiMediaMan (aka Hector), I had the pleasure of leading JISCs experiments in adding various web based channels to the event to allow those not attending to follow the event but also to support people there in person.

Generally I was happy with the way this went - it wasn’t without its mistakes and we tried to evolve what we were offering over the course of the day based on real time feedback but still theres plenty of room for improvement.  Then again I wouldn’t expect anything less - it was always supposed to be very much in the ‘beta’ mode and the comments and feedback we recieved from people during and after were all extremely useful and constructive.  I have no doubt we’ll continue to make use of some or all of these tools at events in the future and will look to have them far more finely tuned by next years conference in Edinburgh.

For a flavour of what was happening at the conference take a look at http://www.onetag.org/ot/display/lister1/jisc08.asp (courtesy of Mike Ellis whose help was invaluable in pulling all this together)

I’m always happy to hear from anyone who has comments about the conference or just general ideas of how to improve things in the future - I have a whole load of crazy a$$ ideas that I’m going to spring on people on Monday at the first planning meeting so am always happy to hear other peoples as well!

JISC08

silly Animoto video of JISC conference - because noone demanded it!

Animoto.com

[notes by Louisa Dale]

Simon Whittemore opened a session addressing the barriers to Business and Community Engagement: defined as ‘the strategic management of interactions, partnerships and transactions external to the institution.

Perhaps interesting that the public sector currently remains the most significant proportion of an (education) institution’s external engagement.

Business and community engagement professionals need solutions to broker knowledge transfer / exchange and professionals.

JISC’s innovation programme aims to enhance institutions’ efficiency, effectiveness and opportunities and help institutions overcome the barries to access to institutional knowledge assests for business and community organisations.

With significant political drivers, not least supported by the creation of DIUS, there are challenges for institutions. Cultural change,  new skills and support services (contact and information management) are required to support employer engagement and to encourage the exploitation of research innovation.

Jason Campbell spoke on behalf of JISC Legal, which supports the higher education sector in understanding the legal issues related to the use of technology. JISC comissioned a study (now available) into the legal barriers (or better still opportunities being missed) to exploit institutional assets for the purposes of business and community engagement.

HEFCE recently funded a study (now available) to investigate and produce guidelines for the use of Publicly- funded Infrastructure, Services and Intellectual Property.

[notes from Louisa Dale]

Programme Director, Stuart Dempster introduces the partners and challenges of maximising the return on public investments in online content.

The current, inital focus for this JISC founded inititative is on developing ‘real world exemplars and case studies’ exploring some significant issues and sharing understanding; common licence platforms, common middleware, digital repositores, mass digitisation, devolved administration, service convergence, service convergence, policy reviews (Gowers on copyright)

The ‘F’ word is funding, recognising the global challenges of finance and managing public investments in online content.
For more information: http://sca.jisc.involve.org/

Naomi Korn, IPR consultant gave a(n impressive) whistlestop tour of the challenges in democratising intellectual property rights. In essence: copyright democratises intellectual property rights for all.

There is a heterogeneity of content (sound, music, broadcasts, films, photographs, other artistic works, text and typographic arrangements) which have a range of legislations governing such content. In the current era there are a number of new types of content and uses (including learning materials) which are likely to require layers of rights and access.

Unfortunately, the law currently retricts the flow of content; tying up access and the use of content.
As the laws are complex, institutions have unsuprisingly developed a number of policies, which aren’t always complimentary or indeed consistent.

But there are common solutions: from Open Access Initiatives, Science Commons to the European Digital Library initiative.

The Strategic Content Alliance  is working in partnership, sharing understanding, developing best practice and lobbying. Strategic Content Alliance is a just the start … but we know it’s a long road.

Simon Delafond, introduced BBC Timesharing (Memoryshare and Centuryshare), projects to demonstrate the principles and potential of the Strategic Content Alliance.

www.bbc.co.uk/memoryshare

Bringing people with stories to tell and gaining an insight into experience. In essence, to aggregate content around dates.

Centuryshare
It’s early stages for this project, which aims to analyse, aggregate, augment content: connecting online connections across a number of public institutions, sharing and creating public access to collections according to date … and augment the material, creating ‘journeys’ around content.
Watch this space for a prototype launch in March 2009.

Meredith Quinn, from Ithaka (a not-for profit foundation) who has recently explored sustainability of public funded content on behalf of the Strategic Content Alliance: how can digital scholarly projects develop (economic)sustainability plans that will allow them to thrive over time?

The research draws parallels between the news media industry and scholarly communications. Some inital highlights:

1. Importance of engaging in rapid cycles of innovation. The Guardian is an organisation which enthusiastically embraced innovation: ‘we’re going to kill some of these projects, we just don’t know which ones yet’. By adopting this approach, they encouraged rapid developments and sustained success.

2. Seek economies of scale. TimeInc. decided not to allow it’s portfolio of magazines seperate websites. They were encouraged to ’share the real estate’, managing down infrastructure costs, whilst encouraging wider public awareness of TimeInc’s offering.

3. Understand your value to the user. Online academic users are rather specialised, not always easily accessible. The Economist researched their readers and discovered behaviours of ritual; reading the Economist is a ritual. As such they make more online content freely available (because the paper content is so valued). They understand where the value lies.

4. Implement layered revenue streams. In the commercial news sector, multiple revenue streams manages risk and encourages sophisticated understaning of value.

The paper is now available for peer review (do take a look, do comment: http://sca.jisc.involve.org/)

As I mentioned before once or twice (!) I have a real interested in using the tools and attitudes of the social web (previously known as web 2.0 or social media in my posts - decided I like social web as a term for now!) to enhance face-to-face events.  This can take many forms from a simple conference blog right through to live steaming of sessions.

Recently I have spent a bit of time looking at a couple more web applications that are aimed at events and that I’d like to spend more time working with.

EventWax is an online tool for setting up event registrations etc - it was built by the guys who run the @media conferences and is a spin off from their work on that but is an interesting tool in its own right.  It offers a pretty configurable form builder (assuming you are happy with the code it uses) and you can fiddle with the CSS to give it your own look and feel.  I won’t go into details about its feature set (here) but I was impressed.  It does lack a couple of things I’d really like to see though:

- domain mapping - Tumblr offers this for free but I think its reasonable to assume this would be a premium option

- sessions management - most of the events I’ve been involved in require delegates to select their parallel sessions as part of the booking process and I’d like to see a system that supports this and even allows you to set capacities for each session so they will automatically close when filled

- [not sure if this is possible but...] allow delegtes to sign up with OpenID to prefill as much of the registration form as possible and also to allow them to return to check on their bookings later and also sign into..

- [I think this is something that someone clever could do with the upcoming EventWax api..] use the data collected in the registration form to automatically populate other supporting applications - i.e. Crowdvine or Sched.org (more on Sched in a bit)  I think the chance for people to be able to see who else is at a conference, what sessions they and people they know are attending and do some online networking in advance of the event without having to go through the pain of signing up for yet another social network would be a real benefit (guess this would need to be opt-in?)

Anyway those are my thoughts on EventWax (I know Eventbrite offers a similar service but for now EventWax gets my vote - plus they are from the UK and its good to support the few UK start-ups out there)

I also spent a bit of time looking at Sched.org this week as well.  Sched was one of the hits of this years SXSW and offers a simple yet clever tool for managing schedules at complex, multi-strand conferences.  It allows users to build and share their schedules and also to export as iCal  It seems very usable and I like the look and feel of the app as well as its functions.  Currently it seems to be pretty much in a closed beta with individual set-ups being built on request by the two-man team responsible (maybe its conferences they are attending at the moment?).  Anyway I think its great and if it could be tied into a booking process somehow I think it would be a real winner..its certainly interesting enough that I’d love to be able to have more of a play with it.

The Hub Bristol 3, originally uploaded by matt_jukes.

This is the view from my desk at my new home from home at the Hub in Bristol! Its an interesting place - with lots of people doing all kinds of weird and wonderful things based here (though it has to be said today its like the Marie Celeste!)

I’m looking forward to being based here as my consultancy work starts to build as its nice to have somewhere to go beyond my couch each day! The fact its on a street chock full of pubs doesn’t hurt either!

The work at the HEFCE conference running a conference blog and encouraging them to do some more ’snappy’ audio with the help of Hector and Philip from JISC went well with some nice words from David Eastwood the Chief Exec at HEFCE. We got a lot more traffic to the blog than I expected but as usual comment shyness ruled the day!

Anyway it seems to have done well enough that there might be more activity from HEFCE in that direction in the future and that can only be a good thing.

Next week is the JISC Conference and that is the big one really. The JISC Comms team have embraced the whole spectrum of ideas around the ‘amplified conference’ concept and there is a whole lot going on. I have no doubt it will have its detractors but I think for most people it will be a real benefit and is the way forward for this sort of event. Then I would say that wouldn’t I!

I’m looking forward to this JISC Conference this year for all sorts of reasons, not least just the fact that I have missed working with the JISC Comms team these last six months.  However one of the big pluses this year is that I should be able to spend a bit more time attending sessions and demos than the last few years where I was mainly just stressed out and unable to do anything but glare at people as steam came out of my ears!

This year however I have less direct responsibility for the conference and while I won’t be without work to do there are some things I’m really looking forward to:

- the demo of CREW which is something I’m really interested in as I become more and more interested in the whole idea of building web communities and content clouds around specific events and this JISC funded, open source project seems like it could be really useful

- the keynotes from Lord Putnam and Angela Beesley - both of which will give a unique perspective I think and its always good to get different speakers who aren’t always doing the ‘circuit’

- spending some time in the exhibition area, particularly around the OSS Watch open source demo-area - an idea that Randy and I spoke about in passing at last years conference and that Ross and Grace have turned into a reality

- having my traditional drink in All-Bar-One as soon as the conference is over!

All that combined with the Crowdvine network, the (micro)blogging, live video streaming, podcasts and what looks like the most balanced, interesting programme in a while and certainly the largest attendance should make for an exciting day!