jiscri - The results
We have been notifying and sending out grant letters to bidders to the JISC Rapid Innovation call, also known as jiscri, this week and are now able to release some information about the call.
We got 94 bids for the call and have ended up funding 33 projects at a cost of £1.1m. Originally we had allocated less funding to this call but in response to the number and quality of bids we received it was agreed we were able to increase the level of funding available for these projects. So thank you to those that submitted proposals and showed interest in this programme activity.
The 33 projects still need to sign and return their grant letters before the projects are confirmed so we can’t give a full run down of them yet but will list them on this blog and the JISC website as soon as we can. We were able to fund projects in each of the priority areas specified in the call:
- Mashups
- Aggregating tags
- Semantic web and linked data
- Data search
- Visualisation
- Personalisation
- Mobile technologies
- Lightweight shared infrastructure services
- User interfaces
The projects will start in June and run for 6 months. We will be having a meeting for these projects and people interested in them in early September. An announcement about this should come from the IE demonstrator soon. The IE demonstrator will be showcasing the work of these projects so it is a good RSS feed to grab if you are interested in jiscri.
A technical challenge for a Friday afternoon
We have had an interesting technical challenge posed by Chris Rusbridge, Director of the DCC relating to marking JISC bids and wondered if any of you clever people out there could come up with a solution.
For the jiscri call we received 94 bids each of these has to be marked by 3 markers, the marking process has approximately 5 sections with comments. That is a lot of data to process so an online submission system is essential. We use a web form for this. However, lots of our markers are mobile and entering marks directly into the web form is not convenient so the markers prepare their marks and comments offline and then add them to the web form at a later date. JISC provides a standard spreadsheet to help people make notes.
Copying comments and marks from the cells in the spreadsheet into the individual boxes on the web form is a time consuming and dull task and Chris is keen to find an automated way to do this.
I had a look at this myself last night and got halfway to a quick and dirty solution. Since the webform doesn’t have an API, I figured the easiest way to speed things up will be to make the pasting process easier. This can be done with enhanced clipboard systems such as ditto or clipdiary. However, getting the individual cells from the spreadsheet as unique entries on the clipboard in the correct order is a problem I couldn’t solve.
So over to you. Is there a way to use the clipboard solution to make Chris’ task easier or is there an altogether more elegant solution? Chris’ deadline is 10am Monday 11th May so answers before then would make Chris happy.
Here is a dummy example of the webform (it is from a completed marking process): http://survey.jisc.ac.uk/einfevaluation
I have put an example spreadsheet on google docs the text in the yellow boxes is what needs to be copied.
The way in which JISC bids are managed and marked is under review in the JISC policy department and they are looking for a manageable yet user friendly approach. This challenge is not part of that process so we are not looking for suggestions for different marking systems here, it is purely a technical challenge that happens to be related to marking.
We may be able to send a small gift to the most elegant solution but surely making Chris happy is the main prize here.
A couple of resources to support jiscri bidders
Since JISC are not planning a briefing day for the 03/09 Rapid Innovations Grants call, we have provided a couple of resources to support the call documentation.
The first is a high level overview of the reasoning behind the rapid innovation approach and what we hope it will achieve:
The presentation used in this video can be found on the prezi site.
We have also provided a podcast of three JISC programme managers talking about the call and explaining the thinking behind some of the most important sections.
The example bid that is mentioned in the podcast will not be available for this call. Please look to paragraph 65 in the call document for the bid structure.
As always, if you have any questions, please post them as comments.
Grant Funding Call 03/09 aka jiscri
The jiscri call mentioned in our previous blog post is available now. Sorry that it is a little later than initially suggested but this was due to the need to ensure that the evaluation process for the bids for the 12/08 call ran to time.
We are excited about this call and are looking forward to seeing imaginative and exciting bids. Please feel free to contact any of us on Twitter, this blog, by email and by phone if you want to ask a question, discuss a possible bid or get clarification on any part of the call. We hope to be able to offer some form of online briefing for the call, watch this blog for more news.
To help you navigate through the call document we thought it might be useful to provide a reading key.
Information specific to this call
- Who’s eligible? - paragraph 4-5, pages 1-2
- What are the priority areas? – paragraph 32-63, page 7-12
- What about projects that don’t address a listed priority area? - paragraph 25-29, page 6
- What kind of deliverables are we looking for? - paragraph 17, page 4
- What user engagement do I need to include in my bid? - paragraph 18, page 4
- What are the deadlines for submitting bids and getting feedback? - paragraph 96, page 19
- What are the project timescales? - paragraph 3, page 1
- What’s an Information Environment? - paragraph 9 and 25-26
- Who do I contact for further information? - paragraph 113-114, page 21
Standard bidding information
- How do I write a bid? - paragraph 65, page 14-15
- How do I format and submit a bid - paragraph 97-106, pages 19-20
- Is there a checklist for submitting a bid - paragraph 112, page 21
- When will I hear about my bid? - paragraph 108, page 20
- What about recruitment? - paragraph 15, page 3
- What about partnerships and consortia? - paragraph 5 page 2
- How will projects be managed? - paragraph 20, page 4
- How does this relate to other calls? - paragraph 22-24, page 6
- What other projects and work do we need to be aware of? - paragraph 21, page 5
- What’s the IE demonstrator and why do we need to work with it? - paragraph 21 bullet 2, page 5
- Do we need to work with the e-framework? - paragraph 73, page 16
- What about software licences? - paragraph 71-72, page 16
- Where can I find out more about fEC and TRAC? - paragraph 78-85, page 17
- Do I need to worry about FoI? - paragraph 86-88, page 18
- What are the terms and conditions attached to the funding? - paragraph 89, page 18
- Will I need to attend lots of meetings? - paragraph 66, page 15
- What are the IPR conditions? - paragraph 92-93, page 18
These are just the points we came up with, Twitter or post a comment on this blog if you have other suggestions that we should add here.
Remember to tag any tweets and blogs with jiscri
Amber Thomas, Andy McGregor, Balviar Notay, David Flanders, James Farnhill
Information Environment Rapid Innovation Grants
We (Andy, Amber, Balviar, David, James) are happy to announce that we are about to issue a new Grant-Funded Call for rapid innovation projects within the Information Environment on 6 March 2009. You’ll be able to read all the text about what money is available and the conditions for using it in more detail in the Grant but to give an overview of what we are looking for:
- Innovative projects that create a ’something’ related to a user need from a named community. That something could be a new interface, a service that brings together existing services or a tool of some sort;
- The scope is quite simply something that is within the Information Environment (see: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/informationenvironment.aspx for definition). We are not being overly prescriptive;
- The projects should be up to six months in length and between £15,000 and £40,000;
- The documentation for everything in the Call is going to be kept lightweight so we can keep the focus on solutions to user needs rather than filling out forms. We’re just looking for five pages in the bid and the project documentation is going to be kept to blogs or wikis so we know what you’re aiming to do and how you are getting on with achieving it but you don’t spend hours telling us about it;
- The approaches should be agile or open. We’d like to see early engagement with users and for that engagement to be kept up so what is produced responds to their needs and is user-led rather than technology-led.
The drivers for this grant have come from a number of different directions:
- dev8D (http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/) proved to be very successful in getting users and developers together to create innovative solutions to user needs. We felt we should be doing more of this in the Information Environment;
- Whilst we recognise that certain big central services such as the UK federation could and should be provided by JISC, we also recognise that there needs to be funding for smaller, lighter tools, services and interfaces that help users achieve their goals;
- Whilst there is a place for bigger projects that involve senior managers, we feel that there is equally a place for projects where the bulk of the money goes to developers;
- The last few years have seen an increase in the development of lightweight solutions that respond rapidly to user needs across both the academic and commercial sectors.
We’re looking forward to seeing what bids come back. This forms the perfect opportunity for:
- Those who have bid for funding before and would like funding to try out new areas where we may not want to fund via a big project;
- Those new to JISC who would like to dip their toe in the water and try a smaller JISC project before going for something bigger;
- Developers who have good ideas that they might not have quite enough time to fully develop within their normal schedule;
- Technical managers who may want to have funding to ‘try out’ new members for their team on a student placement basis, for example.
The tag for discussion on this rapid innovation Call is jiscri. Please use this if you’re commenting on the Call via Twitter or posting on other blogs and social media about it so we can easily gather all those comments together and learn and respond as we go along. Subscribe to the JISC-ANNOUNCE list at www.jiscmail.ac.uk to get notified about this or other funding opportunities from JISC or go along to http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities.aspx on 6 March to get the call.
Prepare to get happy
The JISC Developer Happiness Days event is approaching fast.
If you are:
- A developer for software used in higher education
- Someone who uses higher education software and is interested in its development
- Looking to develop your coding skills
- Interested in community collaboration
- Want to make new contacts
Then the Developer Happiness Days event is for you.
We’re bringing together the cream of the crop of educational software developers along with coders from other sectors, users, and technological tinkerers in an exciting new forum.
Share your skills and knowledge with the coding community in a stimulating and fun environment and come away with new skills, fresh contacts – and you might even win a prize.
The top ideas generated at the event will be documented, publicised and made available to the community.
Full details of the event can be found at: http://www.dev8d.org
Further announcements about accommodation and details of the event competitions will be announced via the event blog: http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/
The tag for the event is dev8D.
Roll up, roll up for the Developer Happiness Days
JISC are sponsoring an event aimed at software developers in HE on February 9th-13th 2009.
The event will consist of training activities, a development competition, community focused events and a whole lot of networking opportunities.
The event will take place in London. Entry will be free and is designed for developers working in all areas of HE. Developers from outside the UK and from the commercial sector are also very welcome to attend. If you aren’t a software developer but are still interested then you may want to come along to learn, network, observe and maybe provide a user perspective for the developers participating in the event.
There is an event blog which has a registration form and some further details http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/.
Please sign up if you are interested. There are places for about 200 people.
The blog will be updated with more details of the event in due course.
The event tag is dev8D, please use it when discussing the event.
If you have any questions about the event, please leave a comment on the event blog or email d dot flanders at bbk dot ac dot uk or a dot mcgregor at jisc dot ac dot uk.