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.
Information Environment (IE) & Virtual Research Environments (VRE) call for proposals: Briefing Day notes/Q & A
On 15th December a briefing day on the Information Environment and e-Research JISC Circular (12/08) was held. The event was held in order to provide an overview of the circular and to give people the opportunity to ask questions. The circular has £11m of JISC funding against it which is quite substantial. The calls in 12/08 focus on: digital repositories for learning and research, virtual research environments, use of text-mining and automatic meta-data generation and digital preservation. So in short the circular is seeking projects that are mainly about the creation, management and sharing of information that is part of the research and learning process in ways that support researchers, learners, teachers and administrators.
Here are the links to the presentations from the Briefing Day:
Policy and bid submission
Automated Metadata and Text-mining- strand A1
Digital Repositories: Start-up, rapid innovation and enhancement - strands A3- A5
Developing e-infrastructure to support research disciplines and digital preservation exemplars - strands A2 and A6
Virtual Research Environments (VRE) - strands B1-B3
Notes of the discussion and questions and answers from the briefing day:
IE and VRE Circular 12/08 15 December Briefing Day questions and answers
For some notes of the whole event as it went along see Andy Powell’s (Eduserv Foundation) live blog.
A few points of context:
JISC has funded projects and services in all of these areas previously. So what is different this time? I would say there are three general issues that underpin the projects sought in this circular:
* reflecting the maturity of digital repositories and other types of ‘e-infrastructure’ this circular is seeking further and improved alignment of these systems with user requirements. An emphasis in the calls is the need to involve/take into account end-users and a bringing together of these ‘e-infrastructure’ systems with research and learning processes.
* both the IE and the VRE strands of activity are about building on previous investment and lessons - so these are not completely new areas of activity. In the case of repository and digital preservation activity for example we’re seeking more repositories, improved repositories and policies, further integration with other systems and in areas such as digital preservation we’re looking for actual implementation of solutions that have previously been developed. However although this circular is generally about implementing areas where there has already been substantial work the projects are about improvement and so will involve new ideas and development.
* recognition that in many cases cross domain teams and skills are required to create, manage, use and develop digital systems, supporting policies and related practices within institutions.
The decision to publish the IE and VRE call strands together was partly a practical one as both funding areas were due to issue circulars at the same time, but there was more to this decision than that. Publishing them together was, I think, essential in terms of showing that information systems should not be developed independently of the requirements of the research process. I think if we’d published the calls separately there would’ve been a danger of perpetuating this often unhelpful division. In particular the projects sought under A2, Developing e-infrastructure to support research disciplines bridge both areas and seek to bring the research process and scholarly communications requirements together with underlying information systems. This particular strand in the IE calls also represents the fact that developing the Information Environment (or e-infrastructure) is not just about managing and disseminating information it is about supporting and improving research (and of course learning and teaching, although the projects called for under A2 focus on research). I think the connections that are emerging between both the IE and VRE programme areas are a good thing and are inevitable to progress.
The Information Environment (and Virtual Research Environment) Call for Proposals November 2008
The JISC is calling for proposals relating to the ‘Information Environment’ and ‘Virtual Research Environments’. This blog post relates only to those elements of the Call relating to the Information Environment, that is Strands A1-A6:
- Automated metadata generation & text mining (JISC contact: Balviar Notay b.notay@jisc.ac.uk or Amber Thomas amber.thomas@jisc.ac.uk)
- Developing e-infrastructure to support research disciplines (JISC contact: Neil Grindley n.grindley@jisc.ac.uk)
- Repositories: start-up (JISC contact: Andy McGregor a.mcgregor@jisc.ac.uk)
- Repositories: rapid innovation (JISC contact: Andy McGregor a.mcgregor@jisc.ac.uk)
- Repositories: enhancement (JISC contact: Neil Jacobs n.jacobs@jisc.ac.uk or Andy McGregor a.mcgregor@jisc.ac.uk)
- Preservation exemplars (JISC contact: Neil Grindley n.grindley@jisc.ac.uk)
There is also an accompanying briefing document which describes important background information, and outlines some requirements that are being placed on repositories that are involved in bids under these headings. The Call itself spells out the aims and intended scope of projects under these headings, so I won’t repeat it all here.
There will be a Briefing Day on 15th December 2008.
The purpose of this blog post is to be the anchor for an FAQ relating to Strands A1-A6 of the Call. If you have queries relating to these strands of the Call, you can contact the relevant JISC person as noted above and in the Call document, or you can add a comment to this blog post. Either way, if the query would be relevant to other bidders then our response will be via a further comment added to this blog post. In this way we hope to build up an FAQ that all potential bidders can access easily and quickly. We’d also welcome comments (or emails) on the use of the blog for this purpose.
Grant Funding Opportunities
An update on funding opportunities …
This month, November 2008, we will be releasing a Call for projects for grant funding. Outline details are on the Grant Funding Roadmap. UK FE/HE institutions are eligible to bid, with some types of projects restricted to HEFCE- and HEFCW- funded institutions, due to funding streams.
We’re finalising the Call at the moment, but you won’t go far wrong if you start thinking about what you want to do in:
- implementing automated metadata and textmining
- starting up repositories for research data, research papers, learning materials
- networking and enhancing repositories
- preservation in relation to repositories
- short technical projects to improve repository services
- connections between services to support particular disciplines
Bidders will have until January to prepare proposals, and succesful projects will be expected to start by 1st April 2009.
For those of you most interested in supporting research, please note there will also be a Call for projects related to Virtual Research Environments.
If learning and teaching resources are of particular interest, in December there will also be a Call for the forthcoming HEA/JISC Open Educational Content programme.
Date for your diary: Monday 15th December will be a Briefing Day for anyone who would like to come and hear about the funding opportunities related to the Information Environment and Virtual Research Environment Calls. It will be in Central London, probably 10-4. Details will be released soon.
If you’re not based in UK FE/HE, you may be interested in the Funding Roadmap for Invitations to Tender. These are open to anyone, so if you think you have expertise relevant to the sort of issues reported on this blog, then tenders are very welcome.
We will announce the Call on this blog as soon as it is released.
Web tools for programme management
We recently had an internal JISC meeting where we discussed what web tools we use to help us with programme management. Lawrie Phipps and I prepared a list of the tools that we use or plan to use to help manage ourselves and our programmes. I thought it might be worth posting the list here. I’d be interested to hear of any tools that people are using that are not on this list. Apologies for the length:
Community building
Twitter http://twitter.com/ – won’t suit everyone but is very good for little snippets, observations and off the cuff chats that the web has not really replicated until now. Could be used to build communities and for lightweight communication between projects. A useful feature is the use of hash (#) tags, placing the # at the beginning of an event or project tag to aggregate comments.
Blogs – persuading projects to blog regularly is great for the programme manager, for a community of projects and for anyone interested in the project. Blogging is not natural to everyone so perhaps in some cases, blogging can be used to replace project reporting?
A Project Manager’s reflection on the issue of keeping a blog:
So is it worth it? Speaking personally and (for once) completely frankly, I’ve been quite enjoying writing, for several reasons. First, it has allowed me to do a bit of self-indulgent vanity publishing, something for which I criticise other bloggers but, hey, I’m a hypocrite! Second, the requirement to be reflective has made me think about various aspects of the project, which is no bad thing. Third, as it has turned out, I haven’t had to trouble my conscience by using buckets of whitewash to tell a positive story; the project really has been going pretty well.
Ning https://www.ning.com/ – easily build your own social network, a good place for people to get to know each other online, communities can be closed or open and communication can be public or private. Ning is also a useful tool to run before a workshop for participants to start thinking, and during the workshop for getting delegates to write up discussions/findings, this is especially useful in, for example, plenary sessions where sometimes some delegates may have a tendency to dominate.
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ – I am not your friend, I don’t want to be poked, I can not be brought and sold as a pet, I am neither a werewolf hunter nor a vampire slayer, I don’t want a virtual pizza, if I hadn’t contacted you just after I left school what makes I think to talk to you 20 years later? FaceBook? Just say no!
That being said, some project staff are using facebook to some effect, but we need to be aware of issues such as IPR.
Jiscmail http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ – tried and trusted method of community building. Even with the plethora of web 2.0 tools available to projects, the most reliable way of reaching most of our academic community is through e-mail, the JISC Mail lists are simple and effective.
Current awareness
Delicious http://delicious.com/ – the most popular social bookmarking tool. A little limited in some ways and with an unattractive interface but lots of people use it and persuading projects to share bookmarks is a very useful thing to do as it highlights overlaps of interest and promotes serendipitous discovery of information. An important element when using it to share is to encourage the use of ‘notes’ when bookmarking.
Diigo http://www.diigo.com/ – a newer social bookmarking tool, allows you to be more specific about which part of a webpage is bookmarked, it also allows annotation of webpages. It supports creation of groups and preparation of web slideshows. However, not as many people use it already so barrier to participation may be higher.
Twine http://www.twine.com/ – a new social bookmarking tool, which permits bookmarking of any document and analyses bookmarks for common people, places and organizations. Also allows for creation of private groups.
RSS readers (google reader, netvibes etc) http://lifehacker.com/390619/best-rss-newsreaders – like twitter, won’t suit everyone’s habits but if you can find a reader that suits you and can get into the habit of building rss feeds into daily routine then it is a fantastic way to keep up to date with a potentially massive amount of information
Dipity http://www.dipity.com/ - a simple timeline builder. Could be useful in giving projects or a more general community an idea of the steps that led to now and a rough outline of programme timescales.
Crowdsourcing
Ideascale http://www.ideascale.com/ - a tool to source ideas from the community and to have ideas voted for and commented on. Worked very well for the IE team to solicit discussion and ideas from the repository community (http://jiscrepository.ideascale.com/) but plenty to be aware of here, including waning of user interest and expectations attached to voting. Also Dialogr http://www.dialogr.com/
Mechanical turk https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome- take advantage of a community that are willing to work for you on small tasks for micropayments. Here is a great description of a project that used mechanical turk http://waxy.org/2008/09/girl_turk/
Topcoder http://www.topcoder.com/ - tap into a large community of developers. The IE team are talking to topcoder about using their services for the developer community strand of the new programme.
mysociety.org http://www.mysociety.org/ - not really crowdsourcing but they build websites that utilise or support democracy and have worked for the government, bbc and google. Perhaps they could offer JISC something?
Collaborating
Google docs https://docs.google.com – can be used for collaboration on documents in a team or in the community.
Confluence https://wiki.jisc.ac.uk/dashboard.action - wiki for collaboration and communication
Communicating
Skype http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/ - instant messaging, internet phone and conferencing tool
Jing http://www.jingproject.com/ - a screencasting tool. Could be used for projects to communicate developments to the community.
Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ - picture sharing
Youtube http://www.youtube.com/ - video sharing
BlipTV http://blip.tv/ – video sharing
Flowgram http://www.flowgram.com/ - a way to create tours through various websites and content (an alternative to powerpoint or an introduction to a certain area)
Jiscmail – essential for large and active communities
Annotate http://a.nnotate.com/ - provide annotated documents e.g. templates
Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/ - great for sharing slideshows, provides nice widgets and embeddable flash players, not so great at being searched by google.
Bringing it all together
There is little point giving projects 6 different tools without some way of bringing them all together. Here are some suggestions for amalgamating content.
Netvibes http://www.netvibes.com, iGoogle http://www.google.com/ig, Pageflakes http://www.pageflakes.com/ – can amalgamate content with flexible widget based approach. If it has an rss feed it can be displayed on these pages. However it is much more flexible than just rss (see repository widget work http://www.netvibes.com/rwidgets#General, or the exemplary widgets produced by tfl http://www.tfl.gov.uk/widgets/). I have put together an example page to show some of the things it can do. http://www.netvibes.com/amcgregor#Prog_management, obviously this page is shareable so can be used by projects as well as programme managers.
Ning https://www.ning.com/ – widgets using content from other tools can be embedded in ning. This is likely to be more difficult but more flexible than the netvibes style approach.
Getting things done
Tools for managing personal information or workflow:
Zotero http://www.zotero.org/ - a free bibliographic management tool. Only suitable for personal use at the moment but social features coming soon.
Google calendar https://www.google.com/calendar/ - a calendar application which is extremely easy to use and displays calendars of other users very nicely.
Remember the milk http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ – a to do list application that can be shared and can be used in a number of different applications (twitter, google calendar, blackberries and mobile phones).
Evernote http://evernote.com/ - a note taking application, includes ability to clip content from any application. Fully searchable. Can be easily used across computers and on mobile devices.
Outlook - task list, calendar all in one place and lots of people use it. Some useful plugins such as xobni http://www.xobni.com/ which takes advantage of the hidden social network in your inbox.
RSS readers - a way to manage information overload (see above)
Location and travel
Dopplr - http://www.dopplr.com/ - a social network for regular business travelers.
Have fire eagle http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ and related geo data tools and social networks got anything useful to offer us?
More complicated stuff
Yahoo pipes http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ – loads of cool tools including a way to set up persistent searches across a range of resources http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=1b71cfefcc9933e084970aef476518ab (a nice explanation of how to set up a persistent google search taking advantage of the new rss feature: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/8HqjuPpekeY/how_to_use_the_new_google_web_feeds.php ) and to amalgamate whole lists of blogs into one rss feed http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/2008/10/17/rsp-blog-directory-and-yahoo-pipes/.
Roll your own newsroom http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/rolling-your-own-newsroom.html – a description of how an rss reader can be used to create a webpage of information relevant to colleagues. Could be used within JISC or within project community.
Notes
Tagging. It is important to think about tags at the start of programmes and projects so that searching across a range of applications is simple and effective.
It is very unlikely that simply advising projects to use a tool will work, the programme manager will need to devote some energy to promotion and provision of quality content to ensure that the resources are useful to projects. The best way to promote the use of a tool is to effectively use the tool.
Manuel Castells and Open Access
Manuel Castells and Professor John Barrow featured in a recent edition of the Forum programme on the BBC World Service. It was an interesting discussion, touching on Castells’ view of the emerging network organisation and society, and Professor Barrow’s observations on scientific practice in that context. Castells sees ICT as affording advantage to organisational arrangements that are horizontal (rather than bureaucratic), featuring loosely coupled units of highly skilled professionals, using project-oriented relationships with other such units to get work done. It is a picture that many academics will find familiar of course. Professor Barrow cited arXiv as an example of researchers working in this way, contrasting it with the more traditional “institution” of accessing the literature via journals. Might he also have mentioned libraries? This did make me think about Lorcan Dempsey’s ideas of the network effect and gravitational pull on the web, but also of arXiv’s ability to embed itself and provide value in researchers’ everyday workflow, as they work in network organisations. Providing this kind of appropriate infrastructure for other disciplines remains a challenge.
The top concerns of researchers
What do researchers care about? It’s probably uncontentious to say that they care about access, cost, copyright and quality. There’s a report published last month from the JISC Scholarly Communications Group that goes into a bit more detail:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/aboutus/workinggroups/topconcernsreport.doc
There are perhaps few surprises - the concerns might be paraphrased as ‘lack of access’, ’some funding arrangements inhibit access’, ‘copyright is confusing’ and ‘new types of quality assurance are untested’. One key tool that should help address several, but not all, of of these concerns is a licence to publish. There’s a JISC-SURF one here, but there are certainly others that do much the same thing - ie, help authors retain rights they may need to use and share their papers. It’ll be interesting to see how it gets taken up.
Jorum to move to Open Access
Jorum has recently been awarded £2.4m by JIIE to do what so many people have said needs doing: it is going open access! The new service (“JorumOpen”) will operate under a Creative Commons License and will not require user registration to access and download its content. Users that have already contributed content through existing licences will be contacted to ask if they wish to sign a new open access licence or continue to store their content under the same terms in a parallel service (“JorumPrivilege”).
The new services (collectively known as “Jorum2”) will start being rolled out this Autumn. There will be a range of added value services - such as a development bay to explore integration with VLE’s and to allow users to experiment with learning object reuse - as well as continued R&D. The full press release is attached.
www.jorum.ac.uk
Is this an effective development community?
The information environment, and repositories in particular, were highlighted by Sir Ron Cooke (JISC chair), in his opening keynote at the JISC conference. (See the online conference proceedings.)
He described the vision of a national e-infrastructure supporting the “body of knowledge” at the centre. He told delegates that “[his] nightmare is the challenge of the super-abundance of digital data” and stressed the importance of positioning our repositories very carefully in this landscape of abundant information. From a seemingly different perspective, the closing keynote by Angela Beesley described the work of the Wikimedia foundation, which includes Wikipedia but also other interesting projects I had not heard of before. Their vision is of open access, of making as much knowledge as possible available to the world. Their solution is less about infrastructure and more about mass, scaleable workflows. Her answer to “can you trust user-generated content?” was a refreshingly firm “no. but you can trust the process”.
So how do we develop a layer of scholarly information (for research, learning and teaching) where individuals can find, use and share trusted information, supported by an agile infrastructure provided by institutions, publicly funded shared services, commercial services and wikipedia? It’s a heady mix. I took heed from Ron’s warning that “it’s often easier to have the vision than to have the stamina to battle against institutional inertia or even resistance”.
I think that’s the key challenge for us now, in the world of digital libraries and e-infrastructure. How do we ensure that we’re building firm foundations instead of castles in the sky? How do we avoid going down routes that are technically interesting but offer no tangible benefits to staff and students in institutions?
An important part of the answer is in how we, as a development community, work together to make sure we’re doing the right sorts of things in the right way in the right order. This was the focus of the Rapid Community Building session I went to in the afternoon . The Users and Innovation Development Model marries up the requirements analysis process with the development process to encourage constant sense-checking and quality assurance. We need this on a grand scale if we’re to continue developing in the right direction. The Emerge project is about sharing ideas to support this virtuous cycle and the overall impression I had was of creative chaos! Not everyone wants to work in the web2.0 way. But perhaps if every cluster of developers has an enthusiastic communicator then the community will get more of the benefits sooner.
I’ll finish with a quote and a question.
Quote, with thanks to George Roberts in the community building session:
“Much of what works is already there” Cooperrider and Srivastva (1987)
Question … Is it true? How do we review what works? How do we address the gaps? The IE team really wants to hear from projects how we can improve the development cycle, from identifying useful projects through to embedding outputs. What sorts of things can we all do to make this process work better?
Research data and the JISC IE
We’re hoping to present some themed web pages on the innovation work being funded under the JISC Information Environment area, including one on research data. I thought I’d use this blog to offer preview / pilot that page. I’m not sure if that’s an acceptable use of a blog, but I’m sure I’ll find out.
The aim of the JISC IE work on data is to promote and enable new ways of finding, using and sharing research data. Because there are huge variations in what ‘data’ is, and in disciplinary cultures and practices around it, there is likely to be a ‘mixed economy’ of infrastructure and services to support its management.
There has been a large number of reports on data recently, some of which are helpfully listed in a recent presentation by Michael Jubb of the Research Information Network. Three key documents are the report from the then Office of Science and Innovation on ‘e-infrastructure’, which set out a high-level vision, a set of principles for data stewardship developed by the Research Information Network, and the ‘Dealing with Data‘ report from JISC/UKOLN, which made practical recommendations.
In terms of current practice, two projects promise to paint a clear picture from different perspectives. A study of ‘data publication’ practice among researchers has been funded by JISC, the Research Information Network and the Natural Environment Research Council. A different project, SCARP, is exploring disciplinary attitudes and approaches to data deposit, sharing and re-use, curation and preservation.
JISC and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council have jointly funded the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), which is a centre both of innovation and of guidance. Members of the DCC are developing a Data Audit Framework, which will enable universities to assess what data is being held on their computer systems, and who is responsible for it. The Data Audit Framework will be piloted in a number of universities in 2008.
There is a suspicion that the sector lacks sufficient skilled people to manage research data effectively. A report is due shortly that will review the position and make recommendations on how this might be addressed. The DCC will run a summer school this year to begin to address this issue. Of course, investment will only follow if a business case can be made, and a part of making that case is assessing the costs of preserving data. A methodology is being developed that will enable estimates to be made, though of course without assessing the benefits of keeping data, it is only half the story.
The UK is fortunate to have both the UK Data Archive (co-funded by JISC and the Economic and Social Research Council) and the data centres supported by the Natural Environment Research Council. These services offer expert advice and infrastructure for data management. A feasibility study is underway into the possibility of a UK Research Data Service as a collaboration between some UK universities, to fill in some of the gaps between such data centres. In addition, the DISC-UK Datashare project is looking at how UK higher education can increase its capacity to curate and share research data.
Finally, it is worth noting that JISC also funds work under the heading of ‘e-Research’, which is also focused on research data, including grid and semantic enabling of datasets.