We have a winner! Developer Challenge at Open Repositories 2010 (Madrid)

Jul 13, 2010 by mahendra-mahey

The DevCSI project is pleased to announce that we have a winner for the this year’s DevCSI organised Developer Challenge at Open Repositories 2010 (Madrid). Congratulations to Richard Davis and Rory McNicholl from the University of London Computer Centre. Rory is a Digital Archive Technologist and Richard is the Repository Service Manager. You can read more about all the entries for the challenge below.

This year’s challenge was created by crowd sourcing responses to Paul Walk’s original blog entry inviting ideas for the challenge. After several responses, a draft challenge was created and further comments were invited. After discussion, the challenge was finalised and announced one month before the conference giving developers plenty of time to work on their entries. We encouraged teams comprised of developers working with non-developers (such as repository managers) to enter.  Just to reccap, the final challenge was:

Create a functioning repository user-interface, presenting a single metadata record which includes as many automatically created, useful  links to related external content as possible.

A Developer Lounge was set up at the conference where developers could work on their entries for the challenge over two days. Entrants then had to present what they had developed to an audience of around 50 plus people and panel of judges. The judges, who were:

• Paul Walk (UKOLN – Deputy Director) – Chair of Judges
• Andrew McGregor (JISC – Programme Manager Information Environment)
• Wolfram Horstmann (Chief Information Officer for Scholarly Information at the Universität Bielefeld and Programme Chair of Open Repositories 2010)
• Sarah Shreeves (Coordinator for the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS))
• Hannah Payne (Welsh Repository Network – Project Officer (Organisational))

then met to decide who would be the winners and runners up.

The awards were announced at the conference dinner, the night of Spain vs Germany semi-final at the World Cup, where Spain won 1:0. Luckily it was a happy audience (except for our German colleagues   – even if they did play the best football in the tournament!).

We received 7 entries in total, the panel commenting on the very high standard of all the entries. Presenters were from the UK, Spain and the Netherlands and we must thank everyone for all their hard effort!

Below are listed all the entries, with videos, audio and pictures of their pitches. The winners and runners up were also interviewed after the challenge had finished.

The winners!

Rory McNicholl (Developer) and Richard Davis (Repository Manager)  – University of London Computer Centre

Video of Richard Davis pitching their team’s entry (Richard Davis and Rory McNicholl).

Richard Davis has subsequently blogged about their success, explaining in further detail the thinking behind their entry.

Interview with Richard Davis and Rory McNicholl after their success.

Podcast of interview

The runners up!

Sam Adams (Developer) and Peter Murray-Rust  – University of Cambridge

Video of Sam presenting his pitch

Interview of Sam talking about his entry

Podcast of interview

Honourable Mention

Honourable Mention for Adam Field and Dave Tarrant for their entry ‘Tweepository’ both from the University of Southampton.

This was considered the most innovative challenge entry by the judges.

Oscar Naim (Microsoft Research) presenting on Zentity

Oscar showed a couple of relevant scenarios supported in Zentity 2.0 that were relevant to the challenge. For example, as data is added into the system (via their Web UI), Pivot collections are created automatically (Pivot is a visualization tool from Microsoft Live Labs).

Bram Luyten (@mire) presenting the work of Stijn Van der Wielen entitled ‘Repository RADAR’

Presentation Bram gave at Open Repositories.

A screen cast demo from Stijn Van der Wielen

Sebastian Ten Holter and Michael Fedarb  (Equella) presenting on how  Equella meets the Developer Challenge.

Talat Chaudhri from UKOLN presenting on Drupal Fauxpository (user testing by Stephanie Taylor)

Some screenshots of the winning entry (Richard Davis and Rory McNicholl)

For a more detailed explanation of the entry, please visit, Richard’s blog posting about their entry.