Launched!

Sep 4, 2009 by Julian Cheal

The DevCSI project was ‘officially’ launched at the JISC Rapid Innovation Programme meeting in Manchester today. You can read a series of accounts of this and interviews with many of the delegates on the IE Demonstrator Blog.

The DevCSI logo appeared all over the venue before the launch and generated some real interest as a result of which I’m happy to say that I have already had brief preliminary discussions with several people about supporting or arranging specific events. A quick taster of the sorts of things people approached me about:

• a barcamp event being organised by the
• List8D developers from the University of Kent
• a suggestion from Gobe Hobona of Nottingham University to convene a workshop around BPEL and tools to support its development and use – this suggestion came out of discussion following a presentation from Ian Ibbotson of Knowledge Integration
• a possibility of working with Andy Cobley of Dundee University who is doing some inspiring things with ‘hackdays’ for students there
• an event with a focus on female developers (there is all kinds of cultural male-bias in the developer community generally – in the HE sector we should, frankly, raise our game in this respect). We have a suggestion of a very interesting sounding and appropriate venue in Manchester
• working with OSS Watch on a developer event around Wookie

Now, these are just preliminary expressions of interest, but I’m already quite confident that we will be involved in some, if not all of these. We will begin to firm up on these next week, and I’ll be blogging about progress with this here, so if any of these (admittedly minimal) descriptions sound in any way interesting, leave a comment here or drop me an email at p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk.

In addition to this, we have committed to running a Developer Happiness Days event in the first quarter of next year – we’re aiming for some time in February. You can read about the first of these which was run in February of this year.

We’re still feeling our way into this – but the energy and enthusiasm for developer community events and collaboration was obviously apparent at the event today – and this bodes very well for this project.