You may be interested in an event being organised by DevCSI and Phosphorix entitled:
Pair Shaped: An exploration of the methodology, costs and benefits of pair programming
The event is being held on Tuesday 19th of January 2010 at The Innovation Centre, University of Exeter.
The event is for programmers AND those who have to work closely with developers. The workshop is FREE, however there are limited spaces, so please book early.
Developers may be interested in the following workshops (free to UK higher and further education):
OSS Watch will be holding two concurrent workshops on the theme of open development on December 7th in Oxford. One workshop will examine open development as a part of open innovation; the other will address building an open development community around a software project. Both workshops are free to UK higher and further education.
Individuals should register for the single workshop that interests them most. However, it should be possible to move between the two workshops on the day, so long as space allows. Links to further information, including registration, are given below.
Both workshops will be covered via live blogs, for those who cannot attend in person.
1. Open Source, Open Development, Open Innovation:
For more information and to register, please see: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2009-12-07_business/programme.xml
The central concept behind open innovation is that in a world of widely distributed knowledge, organisations cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research. Open innovation is a means by which companies can both collaborate on research and share outputs. Although originally defined by Chesbrough as being dependent on patented technologies made available under licence there is growing recognition that open source software provides an excellent means for sharing outputs in a controlled and managed way in order to facilitate further innovation.
This workshop will introduce open innovation as defined by Chesbrough and look at how it applies to software outputs from academic research institutions. We will look at how open innovation through open source and open development of software can result in more sustainable software outputs and increased opportunities for continued work. Finally, we will look at how these models allow for commercial or social exploitation of outputs whilst allowing the researcher to remain focused on research rather than business planning.
At the end of this workshop you will:
This workshop will be of interest to anyone conducting research that produces software outputs. Participants will either be engaged with non-academic partners or will be interested in engaging in an unobtrusive way. The primary audience for this workshop is:
2. Open Development: Building an Engaged Community
For more information and to register, please see: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2009-12-07_community/programme.xml
Open development thrives on a diverse community of participants who engage in the project and also attract others with new skills and resources. Such a diverse community also increases project sustainability as the project can survive the exit of participants. However an engaged community does not just form itself, rather it requires active and continuous encouragement, particularly from the core project team. This workshop will help you understand how open development works and provide you with a practical appreciation of the skills, practices and mechanisms that encourage an engaged community.
At the end of this workshop you will:
This workshop will be of interest to those involved in a development project and who wish to benefit from improved community engagement or wider participation through open development. For example you may wish to become sustainable past the current funding round or expand your user base into new areas. In particular we think the following will be most interested:
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:
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.
Welcome to the DevCSI project blog!
DevCSI is a JISC-funded project which will build on the work of last year’s CRIG and dev8D projects and events to establish a recognisable sector-wide community of developers. We believe that developers have much to offer Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), and we aim to raise their profile. We will showcase the best work of developers in UK HEIs, and demonstrate to the sector the development capability which it already has embedded in its institutions. And we hope to demonstrate how, acting collaboratively, developers in HEIs can contribute significantly to innovation at a sector-wide level. It is anticipated that the project will run for two years.
The project will be primarily concerned with delivering a series of events, falling into several categories:
In addition to its focus on events to engage and support developers, the project will examine how a community of developers in UK Higher Education might be supported, and how in turn it might contribute, as a community, to technical innovation in the sector.
DevCSI will be officially launched on 3/9/2009 at the Rapid Innovation in Development programme event where developers from the recently JISC-funded ‘Rapid Innovation’ projects will given an opportunity for training and networking.
A schedule of further events is being drafted and will be published here soon.
