Tag Archives: jisc

Is ePrints Going to be the WordPress of the Repository World?

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Amongst the many interesting things that were discussed at the Repositories and the Cloud event on Tuesday was the plans for ePrints to offer what Les Carr referred to as a ‘Blogger’ like option. Now I can only assume that Les has a long held fondness for Blogger as he hosts his RepositoryMan blog there as it seemed to me that actually what they were talking about was much closer to the WordPress model.

The ability to fire up a hosted ePrints instance by just signing up via a webform like a million social web apps is a pretty great idea – would certainly take the mystery out of Repositories for a lot of people as they would be able to create them so much more easily. I believe the more like standard web services things like repositories behave the better understood they will be by regular users and I think it will also push usability issues forward as more people use the tools and feedback to the developers.

Alongside this is the move to creating a suite of plug-ins to extend ePrints (apparently at Open Repositories they tried out the ‘ there’s an app for that line’ but have thankfully seen the error of their ways!) which I seem to remember was going to be called the ‘ePrints App Bazaar’ but that might be totally wrong..

I’m interested to see whether they are able to offer things like themes to the options offered and I know there are existing analytics plug-ins and it would be great if they were a part of any standard package.

Also the flexibility of the admin interface will be important – will it offer the control a self-hosted option would? If so does this open up the opportunity for people to use the tool as a kind of white-labeled Slideshare?

I think it was the mix of options and the plug-ins that made me think of WordPress so much. A hosted option, a free self-hosted option if you want to run things yourself (in the Cloud or locally), the opportunity to bring in professional support services and an active user community contributing and supporting the software all looks and sounds very much like the ecosystem surrounded Automattic and WordPress just their version is writ a little bit larger :)

I’ll be watching the development of this in the future – I can’t help but be more comfortable with things that seem more at home on the web and the more web native tools like this become the easier it is for me to understand them and considering my job these days that is a good thing!!

JISC Conference 2009

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesclay/2416076056/sizes/m/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesclay/2416076056/sizes/m/

This year is going to be the 1st time I have attended a JISC Conference without having to work (3 years of near nervous breakdowns and one managing the backchannel and social web elements) so I am very much looking forward to it.  The move to Edinburgh is another big change to traditions (and certain members of the Comms team will have to behave better on the plane home than they did on the train last year!) but a good one in my opinion.  I was a big supporter of the idea of moving the Conference around the UK a bit – it is difficult to avoid becoming stale at the same venue year after year (and in particular this wasn’t helped by the lack of technical innovations at the Birmingham venue year after year) and was impressed with the EICC when a few of us attended the W3C Conference back in 2006.  Back then the current JISC Event Manager Grace was a prominent member of the team that ran that event so she was obviously impressed with he place as well :)

It allows a few new faces to attend the event and judging by the fact it has already ‘sold out’ with 3 weeks to go is a sign that there was a real demand for this change.

The team are working on quite a few innovations this year with additional facilitated networking opportunities and some pre conference activities – all of which i I know have added alot of stress and strain to the team but I’m sure they will be worth the efforts and if not you are always guaranteed a decent drink in Edinburgh..

Given the attendance of so many folks on Twitter and active bloggers I think it might be nice to have a little Tweetup on the Monday evening in a local public house?  Its always good to take the opportunity to put faces to icons and in my experience on the day of the conference things tend to get away from you (or maybe thats just me!)

I’ll be in Edinburgh from the Sunday afternoon – though likely very hungover after a day/night out in Dumfries the previous night including the England v Scotland rugby match!

US Airforce Blog Flowchart – everyone should have one!

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Now this is a bit out of date now as I meant to blog about this a week or so again when I saw it a week or so ago but I think its interesting and important enough to quickly mention – if only as a reminder to myself in the future.  This is exactly the sort of thing I wish I’d had the brains to come up with when I was at JISC (and later HEFCE) trying to convince people of the worth of engaging in the online conversations about them.  As it happens JISC have ended up doing pretty well without me but HEFCE could still do with dipping their toes into a more active participation with their online audience.

The flowchart isn’t perfect but its bloody good and certainly gives people a quick primer of how they should deal with social media and where and when they should act themselves or pass it on.  Anyway take a look – I think its a really useful resource. (I originally found out about this from someone on Twitter who I am afraid I have forgotten who – however the first blog I read about it on was http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/12/31/diagram-how-the-air-force-response-to-blogs/)

airforce

Looking forward to JISC Conference 2008

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I’m looking forward to this JISC Conference this year for all sorts of reasons, not least just the fact that I have missed working with the JISC Comms team these last six months.  However one of the big pluses this year is that I should be able to spend a bit more time attending sessions and demos than the last few years where I was mainly just stressed out and unable to do anything but glare at people as steam came out of my ears!

This year however I have less direct responsibility for the conference and while I won’t be without work to do there are some things I’m really looking forward to:

- the demo of CREW which is something I’m really interested in as I become more and more interested in the whole idea of building web communities and content clouds around specific events and this JISC funded, open source project seems like it could be really useful

- the keynotes from Lord Putnam and Angela Beesley – both of which will give a unique perspective I think and its always good to get different speakers who aren’t always doing the ‘circuit’

- spending some time in the exhibition area, particularly around the OSS Watch open source demo-area – an idea that Randy and I spoke about in passing at last years conference and that Ross and Grace have turned into a reality

- having my traditional drink in All-Bar-One as soon as the conference is over!

All that combined with the Crowdvine network, the (micro)blogging, live video streaming, podcasts and what looks like the most balanced, interesting programme in a while and certainly the largest attendance should make for an exciting day!

Events 2.Oh god not another 2.0!

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So as I spend more time focussing on what I am going to fill my days with as a freelancer in the near future one topic keeps coming to the top of the list and that is events.  This will almost certainly amuse many of my ex-JISC colleagues as I did little but moan about events during my time there but as time went on I started to get my head around them and began to identify opportunities to do interesting things around events and ways to improve some of the processes involved in running them.

For this years JISC Conference I had the perfect working relationship!  I worked on the early planning stages identifying speakers, topics for sessions, ideas for the venue and some of the thinking around sponsorship. Then I left all the hard work to Grace and Greg!  They have worked incredibly hard pulling together a brilliant looking conference that filled its 750 places in record time!

Anyway then I wandered back in a few months later and gave a presentation to the team about using the social web to build a community and a buzz around the event.  Crazy bunch that they are they bought into it all and so this years conference will have a Crowdvine social network, live blogging, lots of twittering, a bit of Flickr-ing and also some uStreaming!  All-in-all I think it should be good fun and add to the conference.  I hope to do alot more of this kind of thing and think it suits a great deal of JISC-type of events and I think its exactly the sort of thing that makes the social web so interesting.

Anyway one of the pieces to the puzzle that I had been lacking was an easy way to aggregate all this online activity – not just from the JISC guys but from everyone else.  I played around with Yahoo Pipes and various saved searches on Google Blog search and Technorati but could not quite get my head around what I wanted and how to display it.  I was sure it was a good idea though and even bought a domain name (www.eventstreams.org but we’ll get back to that later!) for the eventual web app that would make me my fortune!  Anyway I couldn’t work it out and couldn’t afford to eLance it so I gave up on the idea….then lo and behold via the power of Twitter Mike Ellis – (former Museum web maestro and now something important sounding at Eduserv) announces his new side project is called http://www.onetag.org and to quote

“the idea is to find a way of encapsulating the excitement, “liveness” and buzz of a conference or event – in real time – but also as a way of collecting as much of the discussion as is possible, for later browsing or archiving.”

Now that sounds just about perfect for what I had in mind so I got in touch with Mike and am now doing a bit of beta testing for him but also hoping to use the tool in my upcoming work (especially the very cool slideshow element that would look great on a big plasma on the JISC stand!)

Anyway in keeping with my event theme earlier today Ryan Carson tweeted about a new blog post over at Carsonified about their new internal app Event Stream -  (see I told you my domain name would come up again!).  As they run more and more conferences (including the new one to their portfolio Fuel – which sounds right up my street! ) Carsonified decided to build an event management system (EMS?) to simplify the booking process and back end processes.  This might sound simple but believe me event booking forms are the devils work and few if any are much use and they all seem to ignore the strides in user experience taken everywhere else on the web!  I think this could be a real winner and hope they make it a public app some time in the future especially if a) they added a way of managing parallel sessions at an event and b)it allowed custom CSS and domain mapping (for a price of course!)  I can think of a number of people who would be interested off the top of my head.

The other thing I’d like to see – though this might just be me being a bit mental as it seems so obvious people must of thought of it – is to combine the booking process automatically with an event social network.  The info you give when you sign up for an event is close to that of creating a profile anyway so why not combine them and offer a small focussed network that just enhances networking opps but doesn’t try to be a fully fledged Facebook clone.  Maybe I’m missing something obvious – it happens alot!

Anyway one way or another I guess I am going to stick with this social web enabled events theme for a while and see where it goes – smarter people than me seem to think its a good idea!