It's educational...

[Michiel de Jong]

I've often said that I hoped university sysadmins would be on the forefront of setting up unhosted storage for their users. It was them who bootstrapped usenet into existence, it was them who bootstrapped email into existence. And i guess it was them who bootstrapped the web into existence, too. University sysadmins are in a unique position to bring open technology to the tipping point. When university staff and students have put enough content on there for it to become 'a thing', private and commercial users can pick it up and take it further.

Yesterday I had the honour to talk to surfnet, the collaboration and identity federation platform between Dutch universities and other higher education institutions. And it looks like there will soon be one million users who have unhosted storage through the university where they work or study at! \o/ \o/ \o/

It will be a proof-of-concept first, and they still have to fit it into their yearly work planning, but if we make it work well for them, they said they might be willing to show the proof-of-concept to other European countries through the Retena conference, in May 2012. Can you imagine?

I remember i got my first email address when i arrived as a student at Leiden university, in 1994. The first use i had for it was to submit course work. Soon after, we used it for discussing feedback on that same course work, and students started emailing each other. If i hadn't been told to use email for submitting course work, then i probably wouldn't have started using it. I would probably have had the email address without being aware that i had it, or what i could use it for.

So we need apps. They may be things that you could have done as a hosted website or as an android app. And they don't have to take advantage of the fact that all a user's fellow students or fellow faculty members are also 'pre-registered'. But it could help. Through html5 geo, you can detect at which university someone is while they're using the app. They may be specific to research, or specific to studying. They may be related to the Netherlands or to Europe, student exchange, conferences, research bibliography, student life, course work, ... anything! as long as it rocks. something people would really use.

Any apps that will make researchers and students use their accounts, can help us here. With those apps, the proof-of-concept can become a success. Maybe a million Dutch academics will use the app you wrote! And a year later, it might be spreading to one or two other countries. That's a nice audience, I would say. :)

There is a lot of existing javascript code out there, and a lot of it is available for reuse. This means you won't have to program a lot to create such an app. Just adapt existing libraries and widgets to create something new, and something that can be used with unhosted accounts.

So if you're an app developer, now is your chance to develop something that's not locked into the platforms of Apple and Google.

Cheers,

Michiel.

[Thad Guidry]

I would say this is an Excellent use case of a "citations" social app and my previous discussion of using unhosted storage for Mendeley and Zotero !  Some might even want to recast a new app that solves problems that those 2 do not already solve, or could be improved upon, or gasp! even simplified.

-- 

-Thad
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry

[Timothee Boucher]

Congrats Michiel!

Very cool partnership! Hopefully, this will bootstrap Unhosted to
great heights!

Cheers,

Tim

[ya knygar]

Congratz!

From my field - i see
the E-Education - among the most important computing-involving
processes for the smooth, yet Evolving World progress.
In my country - Ukraine - there are ongoing work for Wireless
Educational Infrastructure that smoothly transfers to E-Government.
If you'd see the latest tendentious -- web applications systems,
clouds, etc. - becoming quite related,
as for example - a kind of Enterprise Resource Planning being
transferred into Educational
Resource Planning, being transferred into Government Resource Planning.

What can i say more? FLOSS projects like this - could save the World, i think.