A selection of tools for setting up an ideas forum
I find the ideas based discussion forum to be a really useful tool for promoting discussions around a certain topic or for managing suggestions and ideas from a community. These sites are widely used by communities, corporations and government organisations. A couple of good examples are:
- Stackoverflow - a question and answer site for programmers
- Dell Ideastorm - a site to submit and discuss ideas about Dell products
There are now a range of fairly easy to use tools that you can use to set up these kind of sites so I thought it might be useful to summarise them on this blog.
Uservoice - example: JISCpress - there are free and paid versions of this site, the free version is limited in terms of how many people can participate in your forum and in terms of flexibility and downloading of the data stored on the site, but the design is good and it is easy to use.
Slinkset - example: UK Uni Start-ups - this is a free site and seems to be very flexible. There is no option to download the data from the site.
Stackexchange - the software that powers Stackoverflow - this is free while it is in beta. Pricing details for when the beta phase ends are on the site. The ability to download your content on the site as a database is planned.
Ideascale - example: Open Austin - there are free and paid versions of Ideascale. The free version is unlimited in terms of how many people can participate on the forum but limited in terms of flexibility and data downloading.
I think these sites are really useful for focusing specific discussions around a certain topic or event and also for ongoing idea and suggestion management. I recommend seeding the site with a few ideas or questions as a blank slate is often intimidating for contributors.
Of course, as with all community focused websites, a community won’t spring up on its own, it requires a lot of work from a moderator or moderators to monitor and promote the site to ensure that it is useful and that it does not stagnate.
I have probably missed lots of tools, so if you have any suggestions you would like included please add them in the comments. I would also be interested to hear from people about their experiences of using these sites, what works and what doesn’t.
Part 1 of 2: Report on #DepoST (Deposit Tool Show & Tell) Meeting 2009-12-10
NOTE TO READER: JISC IS CURRENTLY IN THE PROCESS OF DRAFTING A CALL FOR PROPOSALS TO FURTHER EMBED DEPOSIT TOOLS AND SOLUTIONS INTO THE AUTHORS DAY-TO-DAY WORKBENCH. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO ONE OF JISC’S MANY FUNDING ANNOUNCEMENT FEEDS FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ON THIS CALL.
PLEASE SEE PART 2 OF 2 ON THE EVALUATION (FEATURES AND FLOWS) OF THE ‘DEPOST TOOL MEETING’
Published by: David F. Flanders (JISC Programme Manager)
Just before I sat down to write this post, I quickly went back to have a look at the originalSWORD (Deposit API) Project to look up when the first draft specification was published, to my amazement version 1 was published *exactly* two years to the date of the “Deposit Tool Show & Tell” event: 12 October 2007. And quite significantly (as you’ll see below), there are well over twenty different applications and deposit tools built atop the SWORD Deposit API since that first 1.0 publication. So, CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY SWORD! A little tip of the hat to Rachael Heery who brought a bunch of us hackers to sit around a table to talk about how deposit could be improved, your focus and drive in this space is missed.
The show (and tell) -must of course- go on, accordingly here is agenda for the day along with the people who attended. The rest of the story is picked up by our blogger-on-the-day Bashera Kahn:
12 October 2009, London, UK. JISC held a one-day Barcamp at the University of London focusing on author deposit tools, ahead of the DSpace User Group Meeting at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The Deposit Show & Tell event is one of the first steps in JISC’s plan to invest £300,000 in sustained improvements to author deposit tools. It followed the September 2009 JISC report into how and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings, which provides an excellent contextual backdrop to the challenges facing the architects and users of repositories and deposit tools.
‘DepoST’, as it was tagged, brought together developers and stakeholders from across the UK and Europe who have already broken ground on creating and refining author deposit tools and interfaces.
Several lightning-fast rounds of demonstrations proved that the development space in this area is thriving, with a strong focus on making the deposit process quicker and easier for users authoring research content, from academics to students, librarians to archivists and curators.
JISC’s David F. Flanders stressed in his welcoming address the importance of adding improved ‘feedback loops’ to the deposit process, to provide authors with more information during and after the process than just ‘Okay’.
Flanders mentioned a few patterns he’d observed in the showcased tools which adopted workflows and interactions that would be familiar to users from commonplace computing or online experiences, such as:
- Drag & Drop
- Upload and add, as popularised by the Flickr Uploadr and other such upload tools
- Machine-assisted, e.g. a deposit tool that crawls the user’s HD for files to deposit
- Network drive e.g. a tool that allows the user to ‘map’ the folder containing papers or accompanying media
- Contextual community dashboard which draws on the ancillary information around other researchers in a particular subject area to create a view of the research community around that subject area
- Tools embedded into existing applications, e.g. Microsoft’s Chem4Word project to support the authoring and rendering of semantically-rich chemistry information in Word 2007 documents.
<–!DFF: The twenty some, short and fast (”lightning talk”) ’show and tell’ presentations followed with five minutes a piece to SHOW their app, with five minutes ‘question and TELL’ following:
Shown & Told:
(1) Julian Cheal, SUE/SIS Systems Developer, UKOLN
- Tool: DepositAir IE Demonstrator
- Works with: SWORD, DSpace
- Platforms/Languages: Adobe AIR, SQLite, Ruby on Rails
- Description: DepositAir is an Adobe AIR application which borrows its look and feel from the Flickr Uploadr. The user drags and drops the files to deposit from the source folder to the application. DepositAir auto-populates metadata fields such as title, ISSN, publisher, author name, and then sends the files and metadata to dspace.swordapp.org.
(2) Dave Tarrant, Postgraduate researcher, University of Southampton
- Tool: ePrints 3 Upload Handler plugin
- Works with: ePrints, SWORD, Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint
- Platforms/Languages: OpenXML
- Description: The development roadmap for ePrints 3.2 is focused on a more modular experience with better desktop and cloud integration. The plug-in works with Microsoft Word 2007 and Powerpoint to extract metatdata and media during the deposit process. Although the current extraction process is inline, the plan is to make it an unobtrusive background operation.
(3) Pat McSweeney, ePrints project developer, University of Southampton
- Tool: PDFMetaExtractor
- Works with: ePrints
- Platforms/Languages: Java, OO-Perl
- Description: This tool searches the user’s computer for PDFs and then intelligently extracts metadata as well as keywords specified within the document. A known issue is that non-native PDF documents (e.g. those converted from Microsoft Word documents or scanned from paper) may return incomplete information.
(4) Peter Sefton, eScholarship Tech Team Manager, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
- Tool: ICE (Integrated Content Environment)
- Works with: Microsoft Word 2007, OpenOffice, Zotero, Wordpress
- Platforms/Languages: Windows, Mac, Ubuntu
- Description: ICE lets you create web and print documents from a word processor. You can use Microsoft Word, or the free OpenOffice.org. Peter demonstrated the ICE toolbar in Word, uploading the document as styled HTML to an ICE server and then publishing to a Wordpress blog. The tool is especially useful for thesis supervision, as it allows comments and annotations to be made without changing the content of the document.
(5) Richard Jones, Symplectic Limited
- Tool: Dashboard deposit in ‘Publications’ product
- Works with: DSpace, SHERPA/RoMEO, all major digital repository technologies
- Platforms/Languages:
- Description: Symplectic’s tools to link the Repository module of the Symplectic Publications Management System to digital repositories using all major digital repository technologies. Users can upload full text documents and supporting information directly from the Symplectic Publications interface. Copyright guidance is collected automatically from SHERPA/RoMEO and made available to users. A stand-out feature is that the author provides distribution rights information only if it’s available and/or necessary; the system doesn’t mandate that this information is present.
(6) Alex Strelnikov, UKOLN
- Tool: Email-based deposit plugin for SWORD
- Works with: SWORD
- Platforms/Languages: Javascript
- Description: The premise of this deposit tool is to encourage take-up and use of ‘1-click’ deposit tools by embedding them in trusted and frequently used applications, like email, or Facebook. The user can deposit papers by attaching them to an email and sending to a pre-defined email address. The plugin checks for an attachment, and if found, sends it to an analysis server where metadata is automatically extracted. Future development roadmap includes support of email threads.
(7) Jan Reichelt, Mendeley
- Tool: Mendeley
- Works with: PubMed, CrossRef, Google Scholar, ACM, IEEE and others
- Platforms/Languages: Windows, Mac, Linux
- Description: Described as “Last.fm for research papers”, Mendeley is more a workflow productivity tool rather than repository tool. It is a free research management tool for desktop & web which aggregates metadata from all papers added to the Mendeley research network via the Mendeley Desktop software. This indexes and organizes PDF documents and research papers, creating a personal digital bibliography for users. Mendeley has enjoyed takeup from users in highly respected universities around the world, including Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, Harvard, Aachen, Cornell and others. The company is attempting to redefine the space, time-frame and influences by which the ‘impact factor’ of scientific careers can be determined, by analysing discussions around research findings in social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.
(8) Ian Stuart, Software Engineer, EDINA
- Tool: The Open Access Repository Junction
- Works with: RoMEO, OpenDOAR, all major repositories
- Platforms/Languages:
- Description: Known as OA-RJ, this project’s aim is to build on the existing EDINADepot to create a ‘middleware’ interoperability bridge between existing repositories which will act as a deposit broker system. The tool will help authors who are either not associated with an institution, or collaborative researchers from different institutions, to find the right repositories to deposit their work into. The system will automate RoMEO and OpenDOAR lookups, and provide an author disambiguation feature. Although still in development, the Nature Publishing Group is interested in using this tool.
(9) Joe Lambert, University of Southampton
- Tool: Drag&Drop Deposit Tool
- Works with: ePrints
- Platforms/Languages: Mac, Cocoa
- Description: This prototype updater is written with the collaborative author in mind. It tries to address the issue of metadata tools for time-starved academics submitting PDFs to ePrints. The development roadmap suggests an ideal user experience of being able to drag and drop multiple files into the application, which would return a report of all the metadata extracted for the user to check, approve, edit if necessary and then file to the IR.
(10) Viv Cothey, Gloucestershire Archives
- Tool: GAip desktop curation tool
- Works with: SWORD, DSpace
- Platforms/Languages: Perl
- Description: This tool stood out for being one of the only deposit tools to address archive and repository materials which aren’t academic research papers. The Gloucestershire Archives deals with physical materials as well as digital records, and faces the problem of taking “a 100-year view”. The intended user for GAip is an archivist - not the creator or the author. Viv raised the very pertinent issue of trusted storage. (Aside: anyone interested in the issues around long-term digital storage should read/listen to Clay Shirky’s Long Now lecture on digital durability.)
(11) Tim Brody, EPrints WebDav, University of Southampton
- Tool: Map a WebDav or FTP drive directly into ePrints 3.2
- Works with: ePrints
- Platforms/Languages:
- Description: The ePrints team presented a video walkthrough of this tool, authored by Tim Brody. This solution seems targeted at a technical IR administrator or author, as the interface design is definitely geared to people very familiar with the command line, rather than your standard non-techie academic user. It provides a browsable and searchable folder structure with ‘dropbox’ like import functionality. At present it lacks any automatic metadata harvesting, and requires the user to complete the deposit via a standard ePrints web interface.
(12) Theo Andrew & Fred Howell, The Open Access Repository, EDINA
- Tool: EM-Loader (Extracting Metadata to Load for Open Access Deposit)
- Works with: SWORD, the Depot, PublicationsList.org
- Platforms/Languages:
- Description: This project, still under development, is a proof of concept middleware that links the Depot and PublicationsList.org, a web site for researchers to build a web page listing their publications. EM-Loader’s goal is to make batch deposits easier, by handling multiple queries for metadata from web-based resources like PubMed, Web of Science, and personal databases such as EndNote, Reference Manager, BibTeX etc. Fred’s annotated presentation on the ‘From Swords to Ploughshares’ is available on his site.
(13) Stuart Lewis, IT Innovations Analyst & Developer, University of Auckland Library
- Tool: EasyDeposit configurable deposit client
- Works with: SWORD
- Platforms/Languages: PHP
- Description: The EasyDeposit client is a PHP powered configurable SWORD repository deposit client which can be configured to create a custom deposit interface for your repository. In this case, Stuart demonstrated how it can be configured to accept deposits via email using the standard PHP IMAP library to connect to your inbox. It extracts metadata from the sender of the email, the email subject, and the body of the message, which should contain the abstract. The script also adds each email attachment to the deposited item. When the deposit process is completed, the sender receives an email with a URL linking to that record in the repository. The script can also be configured for deposit via Facebook.
(14) Alex Wade, Director for Scholarly Communication, Microsoft External Research
- Tool: WordDeposit
- Works with: Microsoft Word 2007, ArXiv, SWORD
- Platforms/Languages: Windows
- Description: Microsoft’s External Research division is working with several leading academic organisations and researchers to produce workflow support tools. Alex discussed two exciting repository developments. First, the fact that arXiv now accepts submissions of Microsoft Office Word .docx files and other Office Open XML documents. Second, the company’s hosted self-publishing eJournal Service, currently in alpha, which helps conference chairs handle submissions of papers, and subsequently allows them to easily select and share those papers (via SharePoint Server 2007) with one click.
(15) Seb Francois, University of Southampton
- Tool: sWordInbox
- Works with: SWORD, ePrints, Wordpress
- Platforms/Languages:
- Description: Seb demod an embeddable remote uploader tool for ePrints, which he developed for the University of Lincoln. It addresses the use case more widely seen as individual researchers maintain their own blogs, i.e. it integrates with Wordpress and allows the user to post their papers to their own blog once the deposit to ePrints is complete. There are still some bugs to work out, not least that embedding a login request into a web page has all the appearance of a phishing attack!
(16) Julian Tenney and Patrick Lockey, Xerte, University of Nottingham
- Tool: Xerte online authoring toolkit and Xpert deposit tool
- Works with: Any LMS or VLE
- Platforms/Languages: Web-based
- Description: This is another of the tools demo’d with a focus on something other than academic research papers. Xerte is an open source suite of tools to rapidly develop richly interactive learning content. Content created in Xerte can be deposited into Xpert, a searchable distributed repository compiled by harvesting content from the publishing institution via RSS feed. The aim is to make learning content available for re-use, re-purposing and adaptation.
(17) James Ballard & Richard Davis, University of London
- Tool: Copyright Licensing Applications using SWORD for Moodle
- Works with: SWORD, Moodle, ePrints, DSpace
- Platforms/Languages: PHP
- Description: Another tool in development with a focus on learning materials, CLASM assists students and academics who deposit through the familiar Moodle interface into a closed repository designed with a librarian’s workflow in mind. CLASM is designed to support better management of CLA licensed materials.
(18) Dan Needham, University of Manchester & Alan Danskin, British Library
- Tool: Names Project
- Works with:
- Platforms/Languages:
- Description: The last of the tools to focus on something other than deposit workflows, the Names Project is developing a pilot name authority system to address the critical issue of author disambiguation. It uses data from Zetoc, British Library and contextual information from research documents to build a database of all UK research authors which will reliably and uniquely identify individuals and institutions. A public beta API is available for testing and no doubt all eyes will be on the British Library and Mimas to produce what most think will be an invaluable system.
PLEASE SEE PART 2 OF 2 ON THE EVALUATION (FEATURES AND FLOWS) OF THE ‘DEPOST TOOL MEETING’
Guide to using some web 2.0 services in JISC projects - part 3 of 3
This is the final post in a 3 part series about using web 2 services in JISC projects. This final part briefly discusses using skype and dealing with meetings before moving on to general advice about IPR, publicising details and further information.
Part 1 of the series discusses using tags for projects, twitter and blogs.
Part 2 discusses social bookmarking, aggregation and note-taking.
The full document of all 3 parts can be downloaded from the JISC Information Environment repository.
Skype
Skype started off as a telephone service which ran over the network. It has now been extended to provide other services including instant messaging, video calls, file-sharing, screen-sharing. If you have a headset and a microphone it is a useful way to hold teleconferences with multiple participants.
It is also a useful way to get instant answers from contacts as you can see when people are online and available to be contacted to ask questions using the telephone service or the instant messaging service.
Skype FAQs
Q: Do you have to pay for Skype?
A: No – not for basic services. There are some functions that require payment. Details are on the skype site.
Q: How do I find out who is available using Skype?
A: Skype has a directory look-up service built in. It also has services whereby it uses your email list of contacts to see if any of your friends are Skype users.
Getting consensus – scheduling meetings, doing surveys
Doodle is a simple but very effective free website that you can use to do things such as agree a meeting date or do a simple survey. It is easy to set up a list of possible dates or options, and you then can email a URL to everyone, so that they can specify their preferences.
Publicising your project’s contact details
All publicity is good. Make it as easy as possible for people to discover your project and keep up to date with developments by making it easy for people to see what sources are available. List them on your project website and any publicity materials and put them in your email signature. Details that are useful to share include:
- Your project’s name (and acronym expansion)
- Your project tag and any other relevant tag
- Relevant twitter ids
- Website and blog site
- Links to relevant resources or public aggregations of resources that provide further information about the area you are working in.
- Your contact details – including Skype if you use it
Further information
Of course it is good practice with using all of these services to read the terms and conditions first to make sure they align with how you want to use the service. There is a useful toolkit called web2rights which can help you navigate IPR in a web 2.0 world.
This is only a limited overview of some of the services available. A more comprehensive list can be found in a previous post on this blog.
There is a JISC project called web2practice being run by Netskills to produce guides to using web 2.0. Guides on:
- Social Media;
- RSS;
- Collaborative Writing;
- Podcasting;
- Microblogging;
can be found on the web2practice blog.
Feedback and the future of this guide
So that is a brief overview of some of the most useful services. Obviously there are glaring omissions from this guide and we would really appreciate hearing from you which web services you find useful in managing your projects and how you use them. We will gather feedback into an updated and more thorough guide in the future.
“Good APIs”
What makes a “good” API”? Can we say anything about good practice in providing or using machine interfaces to third party services on the web? UKOLN have consulted widely and suggest, among other things, that providers of APIs should make it useful, keep it simple, follow standards and use consistent naming structures. For API users there is perhaps less obvious good practice, but it’s important to choose the API carefully (they explain what this might mean), to think about risks, and respect the API terms of use.
UKOLN are now asking developers to comment on these principles; do they seem right? Is it useful to document them? For whom? How?
If you’ve got views on this then here’s where to post comments: http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/good-apis-jisc/.
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.
Mashing thingISBN and library lookup using yahoo pipes courtesy of Mashed libraries 2008
I attended the Mashed libraries event organised by Owen Stephens and UKOLN on Thursday 27th. See Owen’s blog for an overview of the day. I am not a techie but I do love to mess around with software so I was expecting to be an interested observer rather than do any mashing myself. However the event was so good that even a tinkerer like me was able to put something useful together as a result.
Tony Hirst demonstrated how to use Yahoo Pipes to do a number of useful things. One of the things Tony showed was how to use LibraryThing’s ThingISBN api to look up alternative editions of a book using the ISBN. Tony goes into detail about this pipe on his blog.
I am a regular user of my local public library but the opac search experience is truly horrible; clunky, slow and restrictive. The fastest and most reliable way to search is by ISBN. However the problem with ISBN searching is that the opac covers 9 boroughs so there are bound to be alternative versions of most books and the opac is not clever enough to be able to detect this so I have to augment ISBN searches with painful title or author searches. ThereforeTony’s pipe offered a possible solution to my problem.
Tony’s pipe was designed to link the results for all the alternative ISBNs to Amazon so it was simple to tweak it to display links to my local library instead. My version of Tony’s pipe can be seen on my yahoo pipes page.
However it would be a bit of a pain to have to go to yahoo pipes every time I wanted to look up alternative ISBNs for a book so I tried to think of ways to make it more convenient. My first instinct was to try and make a netvibes widget that I could use to search for alternative ISBNs. However making a widget that accepted variable input in the ISBN field proved beyond me. Just as I was about to give up I thought of a different way.
I already use Jon Udell’s library lookup bookmarklet to scrape ISBNs from Amazon pages and search for them in my local library catalogue. Perhaps it was possible to use this with the pipe?
It was not only possible but incredibly simple. You can select the pipe to output alternative ISBNs in an RSS feed. When you do this, you get the following url: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6c6dc73754946fa278bbc1f76cddc469&_render=rss&isbn=0099469693
All I had to do was plug this url (minus the isbn number at the end) into the library lookup bookmarklet generator, choose Innovative from the vendor list, click the build button and drag the result to your browser toolbar. Now I have a bookmarklet that can scrape an ISBN from an Amazon record and look up all alternative versions of the book on my local library opac.
It is not perfect, it is ugly and it does not distinguish between ISBNs for books that the library holds and those that it does not. However, it is something that I will use on an almost daily basis and I am unreasonably pleased with myself. Thanks Tony, Owen and Mashed Libraries.
I find events like Mashed libraries incredibly useful and I always come away buzzing with ideas. JISC will be putting on an event for developers early next year. Look out for more news on this on the event blog at http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org
***Update***Thanks to Owen’s prompting on Twitter, I have now modified the pipe so that it only displays links to editions of the book that the library holds. This uses the content of the h1 tags on the opac pages to judge whether a book is held or a null result is returned and then filters out the null results. It is a rather inelegant solution and is very specific to the opac of my local public library but I imagine could be generalised if you were willing to mess about with it.
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.
Repository widgets
JISC funded a small piece of work to produce some repository related widgets that could be used on platforms such as Netvibes and iGoogle. ICO3 carried out the work for us and I am pleased to say that there are now a number of widgets available.
You can read about the widgets and add them to your netvibes and iGoogle page at: http://www.rwidgets.co.uk/wiki/doku.php
Or to see them in action, go to the netvibes universe: http://www.netvibes.com/rwidgets#General
My favourite of these is the SherpaRoMEO widget, which works really well.
ICO3 will be doing some work to get community feedback on these widgets so if you are interested in helping ICO3 to review the widgets or if you just want to express an opinion, post a comment below or contact me directly http://www.jisc.ac.uk/contactus/staff/andrewmcgregor.aspx. I’d be really interested to hear your opinions and ideas.
The purpose of this work was to explore the possiblities of repository related widgets in this area, not to produce polished tools so I think that there is plenty of room for further development both of these widgets (I’d really like the sword one to have a drag and drop interface) and of other widgets related to repositories and the information environment.
RSP blog directory and yahoo pipes
Last week while playing around with yahoo pipes, I found this useful tool: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ypEo0_zd2xGgEDTaJhOy0Q
If you enter a link to an opml file it will aggregate all the rss feeds from that file into one tidy rss feed with each item labelled with which blog it came from.
The RSP published a series of opml files for a whole load of repository related blogs. These are categorised by blog type, one example is the personal blogs: http://www.rsp.ac.uk/blogs/opml.php?type=personal. Pop this link into the yahoo pipe (the box that says ‘the opml file is located at’), enter the number of items you want to appear in your rss feed and you get a handy little rss feed showing all the latest blog postings from that section of the directory.
This has saved me an awful lot of real estate on my netvibes page.
There is an opml file for all the blogs in the directory but this didn’t work too well for me when I put it through the pipe.