Reflecting on the JISC developer days event
I’ve now had a couple of weeks to reflect on the busy and interesting JISC developer days event (also known as dev8D) that was held in London on the 24th - 27th of February. The purpose of the event is to get software developers from across higher education and related sectors put them in a room and give them opportunities to network, learn and sink their teeth into challenges posed by new software or datasets. We believe that this approach leads to interesting new ideas and approaches to issues, better trained developers and better connected developers who are more effective because of those connections.
I don’t propose to review the event because you can get an impartial review from some of the many blogs written by people who attended the event. This post is meant to collect the interesting things that were done at and after the event into one place so people can easily find out more about what the event produced.
Despite this not being a review, reviews are an excellent way to get an overall flavour of the event. So here are a few of the thoughtful reviews produced by people who attended dev8D.
As well as these reviews you can also see the feedback that delegates left about the event on the wiki.
One of the benefits of dev8D is the networking. Dave Challis of Southampton has used the twitter accounts of people attending the event to illustrate how people’s networks grew during the event
If you have a hankering then you can access all the dev8D tweets from before during and after the event.
The dev8D blog also talks about networking and why it’s important.
We were lucky at this year’s dev8D to have a really diverse bunch of attendees, here are some examples of the people who attended:
- Katie Pekacar - MLA
- Ian Mulvany - Nature
- Chuck Severance - University of Michigan
- Keiran Marron - Eduserv
- Alex Bilbie - 2nd year undergraduate- University of Lincoln
Adrian Stevenson has also posted some video interviews with some people at dev8D over on the eFragments blog.
The event was jam packed with opportunities to learn. These came in the form of guided sessions to learn new languages, quick 15 minute intros to topics, freeform workshops and ad hoc meetings.
All this learning activity is neatly summed up in Milly Shaw’s post on the dev8D blog. You can also get a flavour of how the delegates felt about the training from the review posts linked above.
What does this kind of event produce? Well, not finished software but demonstrators and new ideas abound. This year at the event a number of organisations offered prizes for developers who came up with an interesting solution to a problem or did something interesting with their technology. There were 9 of these prizes offered by people as diverse as Microsoft Research, MLA, IMS, Edina, Memento and the Internet Archive.
A description of all the entries to these competitions is available on the dev8D blog The prototypes produced for these challenges are often worth much more than the prizes offered. Sam Adams, the developer who won the Memento challenge, is going out to visit the Memento team in the US as a result of his entry and Rob Sanderson who ran the Memento challenge commented to me that Sam’s entry was likely to have a real impact on the work of the Memento team.
In a similar vein, the winner of the Microsoft Research challenge has been asked to do a show and tell on his entry at the Open Repositories conference in Madrid.
The ideas weren’t limited to those entering the competition for prizes. There were fascinating ideas people bought along to the event or worked on while they were there:
- Overview of achievements at dev8D
- Reprap - the astonishing 3D printer
- Ben O’Steen’s experiments with the format of books
- Emma Tonkin and team’s DIY electronic whiteboard
For a complete listing of event outputs see the happy stories page of the dev8D wiki which collects interesting ideas, experiments, thoughts, etc.
In summary, it was an amazing event, so much happened and I missed far more than I managed to see. The enthusiasm and energy that organisers and attendees put into the event was astonishing and I am still digesting a lot of the things I saw and learned. The devCSI project who organised this event as part of their remit to support a community of developers in UK HE did a fantastic job and keep an eye on their blog for more events like this.
Make your own event programme for dev8D
The JISC developer days event (dev8D) is fast approaching and the programme has been made available. It has taken a little longer than usual to prepare because the organisers wanted to do something interesting with the source data for the event programme. They have certainly succeeded.
They have provided the data about each session as a dynamic dataset that will continue to evolve in the lead up to the event. This dataset is available to anyone who is interested from the dev8D website and is provided in three semantic web formats: RDF, n3, and nt . The dataset includes details of session titles, timings, and locations.
The organisers have used this dataset to build a timetable for the event which includes useful links to add events to your calendar. However they have also issued a challenge to people attending the event to design a better way to view or use the data. The best examples will be provided along with the existing timetable.
All sorts of interesting tools were designed at dev8D in 2009. So I am very excited to see the innovative ways that this year’s delegates choose to use this data both before the event and during it.
Congratulations to Chris Gutteridge, Dave Challis (both of ECS at Southampton University) and Mahendra Mahey of UKOLN for their great work on this.
There are still a few places left for dev8D, it should be really useful for all HE developers and for people interested in their work. Registration is free and each day should stand on its own so no need to feel you have to attend the entire event. You can register on the event website.
Dates for 2010 dev8D announced
Following on from the very successful developer happiness days event in February of this year. The dates for the second dev8D event have been announced. It will take place 24th-27th of February 2010 in London. This year’s event will run from Wednesday to Saturday with each day designed to stand alone but are also designed to fit together to provide a complete experience. So delegates can choose to come to as many or as few days as suit them. Learning from successful events like Barcamp London 7, Saturday was included in the event to expand the potential audience.
Free accommodation will be provided at a boutique hostel. Accommodation is basic and rooms will be shared but we hope that by providing this it will enable a greater range of people to attend.
Dev8D in 2009 was a very successful event. Exciting prototypes were produced as part of the event and the dev8D competition winner, a reading list prototype called list8D has since been funded as a JISC rapid innovation project. An early version of the list8D reading list software has been released recently for others to experiment with. Dev8D 2009 was mentioned in the Edgeless University Report produced by Demos as a good example of experimentation that can:
help uncover not only new educational tools but also new uses for educational materials, and can draw on the energy and ideas of new constituencies. (p 48)
The sign up sheet for the event will be released soon and I look forward to seeing lots of new people at the event.
A community support project for higher education developers coming soon…..
In February of this year JISC put on an event called dev8D aimed at software developers throughout Higher Education and in other relevant sectors. This event was very full and productive, the main strand of the event focused on developers working with end users to come up with ideas for technology to solve user problems or answer their needs. The outputs of the event and interviews with participants were recorded on the event blog.
Yesterday in an internal JISC innovation group meeting, Ross Gardler of OSS Watch issued the challenge that while dev8D was good, what is following up on what was started there?
Fortunately I was able to say that DevCSI is picking up what dev8D started and, with impeccable timing, Paul Walk of UKOLN announced the JISC funded devCSI project last night: http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk.
Keep your eyes on the DevCSI page and the twitter tag #devCSI for further news.