New Jisc

[Christopher Gutteridge]

I've just come back from the Jisc Digifest, where I've been sort-of
kicking the tires of the new leaner Jisc to see how it's going to impact
the developer community and what we can do to help them help us.

It's not all good news, no more micro projects or even small projects,
but the people there still really care about how to use the resources
they are given to do some good, so we shouldn't give up on them just yet.

Full rambling blog post here: http://blog.soton.ac.uk/webteam/

I think it's really important that as a community we try to help them
tweak their approach so we have a career path and don't lose too many
more of our up-and-coming stars to industry. One other notable thing is
that universities are finding it hard to hire good developers (here's a
tip: on what we pay you can't, you grow them instead!).

--
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cjg

University of Southampton Open Data Service: http://data.southampton.ac.uk/
You should read the ECS Web Team blog: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/

[Mahendra Mahey]

Hey Chris, good to hear a report about the Digifest.

 

I didn't go, but I must admit I was really curious about what was going on. I guess the best way to see what kind of support they might give to the dev community in further and higher education is to start a an open and honest dialogue, perhaps meeting up and learning about it's new direction and the lessons we learned and things we might do differently.

 

Growing developers sounds good, guess it needs the right kind of fertilizer (sorry I have very bad dad jokes!).

 

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[Paul Walk]

Chris,
thanks for this - good post. I think you have been very fair to Jisc - perhaps too fair - but I agree that we should look for reasons to be optimistic.

The main source of any optimism I can find in all this is that Jisc plainly doesn't know yet how it is going to replace the programmes of many smaller software development projects delivered by developers in the sector. Jisc senior management know that they want to manage (much) fewer larger projects, but they haven't (as far as I know) figured out how they will actually commission these. So, perhaps, there is a window of opportunity to try to influence Jisc to understand that the expertise and experience is right here in the sector.

(by 'in the sector' I mean people working in or closely with universities and colleges)

I'll be doing what I can to bring this message to Jisc at any level I can get access to (as I tried to at their DigiFest event yesterday).

Cheers,

Paul

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Paul Walk
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[Graham Klyne]

Hi Chris,

That was an interesting blog post, if a little depressing in places. Thanks for
that. I've been rather out of touch with JISC developer activities for the past
couple of years or so, having been sucked in to an EU project, and currently
planning a "sabbatical" with at best part-time employment for a year or so.

I've been fortunate enough that I'm in a position to pursue a slightly different
model. Roughly, I'm putting a few months of my own effort into an open source
project that I think may fill a gap in the RDM landscape, and also scratching a
few personal itches ([1], in case you're interested). If I'm right, I'll end up
with the bare bones and proven basics of a tool that can be adapted relatively
cheaply to meet specific researchers needs.

Your comments about no more small projects were disappointing to hear, as I had
been hoping to tap small-project funding to support the specific adaptations,
while keeping the core system more of a generic tool not specifically tailored
to HE/research. My intent was that it /should/ look like very good value for
money to a funder like Jisc, as they wouldn't be paying for the experimental
foundational work, but just the "superstructure" elements that deliver concrete
results. From your recent discussions, does that seem like a non-starter with
the "new Jisc"?

Regards,

#g
--

[1] https://github.com/gklyne/annalist/tree/develop
- it's still very work-in-progress,
aiming for a demonstrable prototype in the next month.

[Richard Jones]

Hi Chris,

Good post - I really wanted to come to Digifest, but couldn't spare the time this month unfortunately!  There were a couple of other CL folks there though - I suspect you might have bumped into them.

We've definitely noticed the shift away from small projects - I don't think we've had any small project funding for quite a while now, although there is reporting work coming out that is of the same scale (although not quite our forte).

I think it will be interesting to see how the shift to a membership model affects how Jisc approaches innovation - with the need or desire to provide services to members, there may be more focus on building production quality stuff over prototyping/exploratory work.  

At the moment the exploratory work is being driven by the Student Innovation stuff, which is very similar to the Rapid Innovation approach, albeit focussed around students (and thus new developers to the sector)

Cheers,

Richard

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[Christopher Gutteridge]

Plus there is more of a vibe to push work at SMEs rather than public sector, and Cottage Labs may be well placed...

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Christopher Gutteridge -- http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cjg