Creating A Unique Tag Your Project: for Blogs, Microblogs and other Distributed Web Content
Recently we’ve been recommending that more projects use a “unique tag” as their project identifier. This is primarily because we are seeing more projects effectively use blogs, twitter, flickr, code.google and several other distributed Web tools as their primary project tools (the JISCRI projects posted 500+ posts in six months)**. Aside: Make sure to see a Previous IE team post on using Web 2 services to manage your project. A unique tag enables the aggregation of all this unique content via search engines like Google who crawl the web and bring all the content back into one collection, if the tag is unique!
How do I create a “Unique Tag” - Step by Step
So you probablly know what a tag is but what is a “unique” tag? Below you’ff find a quick guide on how to create a unique tag, or at least a unique-ish tag:
- Your tag should be 6-12 characters in length and contain only letters (A-Z) and numbers (0-9), e.g. “fedorazon”
- The tag should be a single “word”, no spaces should be in the tag. Though you are welcome to compound words into a single word, e.g. “crm4uni”
- No special characters should be included in the tag, i.e. no dashes (-), underscores (_), or any other character you’d have to press in combination with the “shift” key on your keyboard to create.
- Use your tag on Web 2 Tools like: Wordpress, Blogger, Flickr, Twitter (via hash symbol “#”, Technorati and (last but not least) delicious.
- Use your tag with your code repository like: GoogleCode, GitHub, Sourceforge, etc.
- Use your tag on word documents (2007/10) when you save the document there are boxes for both ‘author’ and ‘tags’ prior to clicking ’save’
- Use your tag in the subject heading of all emails to your programme manager, this is especially helpful so your programme manager can keep track of correspodance with the various project participants.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Q: When should I create a tag? / A: Ideally you should create a tag during bid writing stage (or even earlier if you are building on an idea <- never hurts to tag up an idea at a Eureka moment for your own notes). Most importantly for a project you should make sure that everyone knows the tag and agrees that it is a single unique tag. The team should be refering to the project via that tag prior to the bid being submitted and should not change once the bid is funded.
- Q: Won’t this tag get lost as more tags are added to the internet? / A: Potentially yes, but ideally we will have archived your content into our archive before that happens so that the data will be a coherent collection that others will be able to use in the future.
- Q: Why is a tag for every project important to JISC? / A: By all projects having a tag we are able to start doing more quantitative analysis of data, for example text mining on various collections of projects. If we fund several technical projects we can text mine the data produced by those projects to get an idea of what technologies are being regularly used or what is cutting edge. This helps inform us on what kind of training events we should be putting on or what new innovation spaces we should be exploring.
- Q: When I tags then in twitter I use the hash or pound symbol (#) to tag tweets, do I always have to use the “#” symbol with my tag? / A: No you do not need to use the hash symbol for other tagging tools. Though for twitter it is a good idea as it also enables you to set up a twitter archive (like Twapper Keeper) where you can then have your tweets saved beyond the two weeks that twitter keeps tweets!
- Q: What if the online Web application I am using doesn’t have a tagging system, how can I tag content? / A: You can set up a delicious account which enables you to tag any page with a URL of it’s own.
- Q: What if I am confused and don’t understand tags? / A: Contact your friendly neighborhood Programme Manager who is just a phone call or skype away
- Q: What if my question is not addressed above? / Please post your question in the comments section and we’ll get back within a day or two to answer it, otherwise please don’t hesitate to email us.
**JISC is also using tags internally to organise the projects into sets or themes of projects which we call “strands” and “programmes”. For example we have sets of projects organised via strand like jiscRI, vreRI, jiscEXPO, jiscDEPO, jiscLMS, etc. and we organise those strands into programme tags such as “INF11″. Each team in JISC will have a Programme of work, so tags are a good way for you to get an overview of JISC work as well. These tags also help us do our job better by undertaking project support activities like programme evaluation, synthesis and benefits realisation work (as defined by our “Managing Successful Programmes” methodology).
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.
A developer competition focused on library data
A JISC project called MOSAIC has set a competition for developers to develop a web app using library activity data. Full details are below:
The JISC MOSAIC project has gathered together data covering user activity in UK Higher Education libraries. The data, which is freely available for you to reuse, represents circulation records linked to the course affiliations of the borrowers.
The project is holding an open competition to discover what you can do with that data. This is your chance to impress the world with your ideas as well as your coding and to win one of three prizes of £1000, £250 and £100 …
- If you have a yearning to see library information put to best use and displayed to best effect
- If you like developing compelling applications and interfaces regardless of the domain
- If you’re into mash ups – but note that this competition is about any application, not restricted to mash ups
To enter, simply produce a browser based application that makes use of some or all of the MOSAIC library activity data by the closing date - Monday 31 August 2009.
Full details, open access to the data and competition rules
More about the JISC MOSAIC (Making Our Shared Activity Information Count) project
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.