A Community of Developers StimulatingInnovation in UK Higher Education
Sound Software – http://www.soundsoftware.ac.ukMonday 18th June 2012, 16:45, onwards, Maths Lecture Theatre, Mathematical Sciences Building, Queen Mary University of London, England, UK.
Mahendra Mahey ([email protected])Project Manager of DevCSI Project
UKOLN is supported by:www.ukoln.ac.ukA centre of expertise in digital information management
#devcsi
Contents
•Developers in Higher Education•DevCSI Project, 1, 2, 3•Working together…
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“successful companies
innovate in a down market”
Developers• Working and studying in Higher
Education
• Some in Further education
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Some Developer types• Opportunistic Developer
• Researcher, Librarian, Student
• Software Carpentry – some basic training in software development can save a researcher a lot of time!
• Engineer – works in a team to requirements
• Connected Developer
• DevCSI works with all but especially the ‘Connected Developer’
• Strategic Developer
• Trying to develop notion of strategic developer – see later… 5
Developers…• On short term contracts
• Project funded
• Seen as expendable by some organisations
• We can just ‘outsource’…can you?
• Lack of career structure
• Leave what they love doing in an academic environment to work for…
• In times of austerity…what happens?
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Technical Innovation requires investment• a capacity for technical innovation is a
strategic resource which needs investment
• in the institution
• in the sector
• technical innovation is, itself, an investment
• Developers play an important role in technical innovation
• outsourcing IT has a cost
• This results in reduced capacity to innovate
Developers workingVertically and Horizontally
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Tend to work verticallyin niche areas
Focus on technologyin their area
Rarely work horizontallytalking to other developers,
locally, regionally and nationally
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Developer Community Supporting Innovation
funded projectBased at the Innovation Support Centre, UKOLN, at the
University of Bath
Developers working in HE/FELocal Innovation!
Community of connected developers is a resource
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energyengagementcritical mass & proof of concept
Aug 2009 – July 2010
Events…the ingredients…• Informal, Fun!!
• Doing and making stuff!
• Playful
• Spirit of openness and sharing, often not found in other areas of academia
• Challenges, prizes, recognition amongst peers
• Free!
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Events• with JISC
• Rapid Innovation Programme Meeting
• with librarians & repository managers & developers
• Mashed Libraries (3 regional), Open Repo 2010, Reading List Hack Event
• with OSS Developers (working with OSS Watch)
• Engaging Developers with OSS, Workshop on Open Dev, Transfer Summit
• with Scientists/researchers
• Google Wave Hack Day
• with developers from other sectors
• Pair Programming, Developing Phone based applications, BarCamp London, Bath Camp
• with everyone, together
• dev8D
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Building capacity
Before After1 minute 30 seconds
Shiraz won the most improved award
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Building stuff together• building stuff as free-
form R&D
• doing so in a very open , informal, playful, and fun environment
• contributing ideas
Building stuff!
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Open Repositories 2010 (Madrid) Developer Challenge• Enhance single metadata records with as
many automatically created, useful links to related external content as possible.
• used remote services to link data and add functionality
• bringing remote services to bear in a local context
• users, domain experts and developers collaborating successfully
Links Managed by Google doc
Enhanced Metadata Record
Richard Davis and Rory McNicholl from
University of London Computer Centre
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Case study• University of Kent ay Canterbury
• Manager’s View
• "They gained a huge amount. They came back very enthusiastic and full of good ideas. It did a great deal for morale and motivation…. It's a very powerful thing when your peers say that you are doing something the best,"
• “...decided to use the momentum of Dev8D to move forward with agile working and the List8D project by providing the development team with two very important assets: physical and mental space.”
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EventsValueSustainable growth
Aug 2010 – July 2011
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Annual event
Cross pollination, networking, sharing ideas, etc
National / International Challenges
Hackdays (2 days)
Reading ListsLinked DataE-Learning
EPubBioinformatics
ChemistryArt
BibliographicChallenges, Rewards,
RecognitionOver 120 sessions
Mobile technology
Business process modeling
Workflow tools Paper
Prototyping Software documentationDocumention retreat,
peer reviewed documentation
Epub
Pair Programmin
g
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Developers working locally…
Innovation locally…• Happens in a local context
• Local Developers empower institutions to innovate
• Need to have ingredients for innovation otherwise it doesn’t happen
• Precise user requirements and lots of iteration
• Good understanding of local context and good communication users
• Agile methods used sometimes
• Up-skilling of staff
• Saving money
• Open source development
• Need space and time for innovation to happen 21
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Value• having local/institutional
developer resource available is valuable
• that local resource, while limited, can be backed-up by a community of peers
• a well connected community of developers is greater than the sum of its parts!
• 3,500 developers +
• developers can empower users
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Value: knowledge transfer• data-centric research will demand skills
currently held by developers
• growth of researchers choosing a career path in software development?
Value (for money): training• Peer to Peer Training at a lot of events
• Developers giving up their time for free
• Dev8D 2010 delivered 80k worth of training more than the a fraction of the event
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Stakeholder Analysis• 495 respondents, Developers, their managers, Senior IT
managers Vendors, Funders, Users (Academics, librarians, researchers)
• Tested a number of assumptions behind project
• Huge agreement not just with developers
• Local developers understand local context, act as bridge between remote service providers, open source communities, and local end users and add value by integrating into local contexts – 75% +
• Local developers work closely with end users to deliver innovation – 75% (more work needed though)
• Can be shared with sector – 88%
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Sustainability: community• Discussions valuable to peers and to JISC and
wider!
• Community needs to be developed and nurtured
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sustainability: support• events give commercial players direct
access to developers in the HE community, more sponsorship, setting challenges, testing
• this is commercial developers talking to HE developers, rather than commercial sales-people talking to IT managers in HE
• some have already recognised that this is an opportunity
• using a pool of HE developers to test and develop against their APIs - this is really valuable and very cheap
More evidence…• People know anecdotally that developers
bring value but where is the evidence?
• 10 case studies showing local developer impact but providing a balanced picture where more work needs to be done
• http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/local-developer-impact/
• Working on metrics, measuring the actual value of local development to an institution, efficiency savings, improved workflow
• 29 % more user engagement and higher levels of satisfaction in locally developed solution 28
• More events
• More strategic positioning
• Sustain Community Development
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Aug 2011 – July 2012
Some events…• BCS Ada Lovelace Colloqium 12 April 2012
• Managing Research Data Hack Event 3-4 May, Manchester
• Dev8eD – 28-29 May, Birmingham, UK
• Open Biblio/DevCSI Collaboration 12-14 June, London (Bibliographic data tools)
• Global Developer Challenge, Open Repositories 2012, 9 – 12 July, 2012
• DevXS – working with undergraduates, Nov 2012 Liverpool
• Dev8D – annual Jamboree, Feb 201330
Some stats• DevCSI organised / supported over 40
events
• Over 2800 people attended events
• From over 540 institutions, organisations and companies
• New survey out!
• http://svy.mk/devcsi12
• Win £200 or one of four £50 amazon vouchers!
• About Developers in Higher Education, about you, includes benchmarking… 31
The Story of a Hack Day
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1. Come up with ideas2. Group together 3. Categorise 4. Consider and choose the ideas
5. Get into groups 6. Work into the night 8. Present to audience
?9. Develop Further
7. Work during the day
Recent Examples…• Using Bit Torrent and SWORD 2 protocol to deal with Data
Sets in Institutional Repositories
• Visualisation of BBC data
• Used a (1907) Metric RDF graph structure that one group member had applied to molecule comparison context (Tanimoto coefficient), and applied this metric to BBC data overnight
• Live Subtitling of Video
• VTT Video Caption Creator
• http://scottbw.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/creating-subtitles-and-audio-descriptions-with-html5-video/
• Screen hider
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Want to work with us…?• Hack events – Reading Lists, Accessibility, E-
Learning, Linked Data, Bioinformatics, Managing Research Data, BiblioHack
• Ideas, ePUB (ebooks)
• devSCI – scientists and developers
• devLib – librarians and developers
• devGreen – developers and greening issues
• devART – artists, musicians and developers
• devSound…how?
• Book Sprints, open source documentation
• Sprints in general, open source projects 35
