A centre of expertise in digital information management Community-Led Activities Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY Email [email protected]UKOLN is supported by: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/online/ emerge-2007-06/ About This Talk Questions to be addressed: • What useful work can be done without significant project funding? • What are the benefits of community-led activities? • How can community activities help to enhance project proposals? • How can community-led activities help to embed project-funded deliverables? This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 2.0 licence (but note caveat) Resources bookmarked using ‘jisc-emerge-2007-06- 07' tag
Talk on "Community Led Activities" given at JISC Emerge online event on 7 June 2007. See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/online/emerge-2007-06/
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Transcript
A centre of expertise in digital information management
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
5
Aims of Session
This talk (and follow-up discussion) aims to:• Provide a better understanding of benefits of
community-led activities• Give examples of community-led activities• Invite suggestions and discussion on
community-led activities for Emerge community
Intr
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“If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”
Within the context of U&I / Emerge’s remit for rapid development, testing, learning, iteration, etc. which may lead to new best practices for development work
Within the context of U&I / Emerge’s remit for rapid development, testing, learning, iteration, etc. which may lead to new best practices for development work
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Why Community?
Successful deliverables require range of expertise:
• Visionary, innovative thinking• User-focussed thinking• Development expertise• Dissemination expertise• User engagement• …
Using a community can enable better products to be delivered
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A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Why Community-Led?Its what we expect these days:
• We encourage students to take responsibility for aspects of their own learning
• Why should we expect all ideas & initiatives in projects to develop within projects teams, advisory groups and input from funders?
It provides diversity:• Staff development• Exploitation of new ideas, technologies, …• Avoids the “We tried that in the C20th and it didn’t
work” mentality• Challenges orthodoxies which may no longer be
valid• …
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A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Why Now?
Why is it appropriate to take this approach now?• Technical infrastructure in place: RSS,
‘cool URIs’, clean(-ish) HTML and CSS• Web 2.0 focus on user-generated content• Diverse set of application environments
available• Easy to use (users won’t want training or
read manuals)
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This covers the technical reasons why it is timely to exploit social networking software. Non-technical reasons are out-of-scope for this talk.
This covers the technical reasons why it is timely to exploit social networking software. Non-technical reasons are out-of-scope for this talk.
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Why Not?
What if Google, … goes out of business?
What about copyright, data protection, …?
But I’m a developer – I’ll be out of a job
I’m a manager – what about use in mission-critical areas?
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A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Why Not? Really?
What if Google, … goes out of business?
What about copyright, data protection, …?
But I’m a developer – I’ll be out of a job
I’m a manager – what about use in mission-critical areas?
Can you guarantee ongoing provision of your deliverables, your institutions’ or the government’s? And what if Google thrives?
Risk assessment & management; we’ve been here in 1990s - and the world may change (cf. YouTube & Warner music)
World doesn’t owe you a job writing software which isn’t needed! You’ll have a job doing the integration, support, …
Risk assessment & management; provision of alternatives; migration plans; user engagement; sharing experiences, …
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“Risk Assessment For Use Of Third Party Web 2.0 Services”, QA Focus“Risk Assessment For Use Of Third Party Web 2.0 Services”, QA Focus
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Why Not? (2)
We need to do server-side proper development
Our SysAdmins say:• Too busy• It’s complicated; we’d need to upgrade Perl
libraries, install new version of database, wait until a full moon; …
• Sorry, can’t open that port – “There be dragons”
• Add you own story here
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Why Not? Really? (2)
It’s not just about del.icio.us, Flickr, Facebook, …You can also use third party ISPs, which can provide 2-click interfaces to applications e.g. Site5’s Fantastico/Cpanel provides:
• Moodle• Wordpress• Drupla• PHP …• …
Or use Amazon S3 / EC2 to rent storage, CPU cycles, APIs, …
For ~ $6/month!For ~ $6/month!
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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The IWMW Community (1)
Institutional Web management profession:• Newish profession (circa 1994-5)• Initial enthusiasm, then awareness of role as
pawn in institutional power struggles Establishment of:
• web-support then website-info-mgt mailing lists set up in mid-1990s
• Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) established in 1997
• Held annually since then• 150+ delegates attend• Now several generations of participants
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A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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The IWMW Community (2)
Strengths of the community:• Shared goals and interests• Shared challenges (lack of resources,
unreasonable expectations, difficult users , …)• Annual F2F helps community building
Weaknesses:• Focus on helping with specific (often technical)
problems and sharing solutions• Limited opportunities for strategic thinking• Limited exploitation strengths of community and
social network technology (still many primarily using JISCMail lists – but some isolated uses of blogs, wikis, …)
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A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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IWMW 2007
IWMW 2007:• University of York on 16-18 July (now fully
subscribed)• Building on technical innovations from previous
years (WiFi network, real-time chat, wikis, folksonomies, …)
This year:• Innovation Competition encouraging submissions
which are: User-focussed Light-weight ‘Cool’ – user response of “Wow”, “I wish I’d
thought of that!”, “We must do that”, …
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A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Supporting The Competition (1)
To encourage community-led development work:
• Provide data for techies to exploit
• Provide open access (CC) to avoid legal problems
Note icon may represent multiple speakers from an institution or region
Note icon may represent multiple speakers from an institution or region
A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Managing The Risks
What if nobody enters the competition?
Avoiding The Problem
• We can incentivize the competition (a prize – depending on budget and sponsorship, kudos, …)
• We can highlight personal benefits (add to CV)
• We can highlight organisational benefits (University of X won an award for Y)
• We can encourage our friends to enter
• We can provide examples of developments ourselves
Learning For Next Year
• We can gain feedback and encourage competitors & non-competitors to share their experiences
• We can encourage them to join in next year (its new for them and they weren’t sure of what to do)
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A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Ideas For Competition
Some ideas (but should I be explicit?):
• Location map of all 11 IWMWs. Done – but can it be enhanced (e.g. cloud maps from abstracts of speakers’ talks)
• Map of location of all plenary speakers (done)
• Delegate maps. Are we attracting participants from across the country? Which institutions have never attended? What’s the carbon cost of delegates travelling?(Note data protection, privacy, etc. issues)
• Timeline. V0.1 done – but potential for richer timelines
• RSS feeds – many provided for use by others
• YouTube video, Second Life, …
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A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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About The LearningThe competition may be fun and useful applications developedMore importantly it’s an opportunity to:
• Try something new• Gain feedback from friendly audience• Gain understanding of potential of
lightweight Web 2.0 technologies• Understand how your data can be reused
by others (to everyone’s benefit)• Break down the ‘we must do everything
ourselves’ attitude
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A centre of expertise in digital information management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Application To Emerge
Emerge Community Generated Activity Policy RFC
For a community to be successful:
• Members have common interests
• Feeling of openness
• Members need to develop
• Links with others
• Energy and enthusiasm
This relates closely with the approaches taken with the IWMW community
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See Community generated activity policy, <http://jiscemerge.org.uk/vle/mod/resource/view.php?id=14>
A centre of expertise in digital information management