Who should come?

The event is aimed at developers, web developers, information specialists, data managers and policy makers who are interested in the provision of open data to support a variety of institutional activities.

What’s going to happen?

The day will include presentations which outline various examples if use of open data such as:

• Several open institutional data case studies
• Surveying data of institutional use of social media services

Time has also been allocated for a number of lightning sessions where delegates can talk about projects, technologies or issues that they think other attendees will find interesting.

In addition to the talks, there will be opportunity for participants to suggest ideas for open development activities which could be developed during the workshop. Results from the event will be presented at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2011.

A quick preview…

The opening talk will be presented by Chris Guttridge from the University of Southampton. Here is Chris waxing lyrical about the potential for open, linked data at our Linked Data Hack Day earlier in the year…

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Inspired?

There are still a few places available for the workshop, which include FREE accommodation. Make sure you visit the event website to find out more and book your place now.

If you have any questions about the event, please email m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk.

Enter simply by blogging about your application and emailing the blog post URI to joy.palmer@manchester.ac.uk by the deadline of 2359 (your local time) on Monday 1 August 2011.

What’s it about?

UK Discovery is working with libraries, archives and museums to open up data about their resources for free re-use and aggregation. DevCSI is working with developers in the education sector, many of who will have innovative ideas about how to exploit this open data in new applications.

This Developer Competition runs throughout July 2011. It starts on Monday 4 July – Independence Day, a good day for liberating data – and closes on Monday 1 August. It’s open to anyone anywhere in the world and there are several prizes long as you follow the simple rules

The Competition

1. You build a software application / tool
2. You must use at least one of our 10 data sources
3. You may optionally combine our data with any other data
4. Your code should be Open Source – available for others to use, perhaps at Github, Googlecode or Sourceforge
5. You finish by 2359 your local time on Monday 1 August
6. You make your final entry by blogging it and emailing the blog URI to joy.palmer@manchester.ac.uk (or send the details for us to blog)
7. The judges will select the winners to be announced on 5 September, 2011.
8. If your entry works, it will be linked from the Discovery and DevCSI websites
9. You can ask questions at http://getthedata.org and directly to m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk (DevCSI Project Manager)
10. Tweet #discodev and #devcsi

The 10 Data Sources – Use one or as many as you like

We’ve gathered data from 10 sources in libraries and archives and museums, all licensed for you to reuse freely and to aggregate with any other data. The data describes things ranging from books and electronic journals to archival collections and museum artefacts. Some of the sources are from famous places, some are quite technical, some are very descriptive.

We created a directory (or catalogue) to tell you more about each resource, how to access the data (APIs etc) and what format it’s in.

Why not start by looking at this.

THIRTEEN Prizes

We are offering 13 prizes. Here are the three ways you can win a prize and bear in mind that your entry can win more than one!

• Best entry for each dataset – there are 10 datasets so there could be 10 winners of £30 Amazon vouchers and an aggregation could win more than one!
• Data Munging – Best example of Consolidating or Aggregating or De-duplicating or Entity matching or … one prize of £100 Amazon voucher.
• Overall winners – An EEE Pad Transformer for the overall winner and a £200 Amazon voucher for the Runner Up.

Full Information

Read on to find out about

• How to enter
• Judging Criteria
• Supporting Information
• Rules & Small Print

How to enter

• Produce a browser based application that uses one or more of our data sources
• Include the URI for your application in an introductory blog post (or a document which we can blog)
• If you wish to provide any documentation, make it available either in your blog post or within the application web pages
• An entry will be deemed to have been submitted only when an email pointing to the blog post (or containing equivalent text) and including your name and contact details has been received at joy.palmer@manchester.ac.uk
• The closing date stamp for emails is 2359 hours (your time) on Monday 1 August 2011.

Judging Criteria

What will win? We are interested in entries that genuinely improve the utility of libraries, archives and museums for their users. Entries should be browser-based applications that make use of one or more of the listed data sources. They will be evaluated on FOUR broad criteria, which are loosely defined, in order not to constrain innovative and wide-ranging ideas.

1. How easy is it to use?
2. How useful is it?
3. What potential does it have?
4. How engaging is it?

These criteria are a guide to entrants and to judges, whose decision will be final.

Supporting Information

The following may be helpful

• List of useful resources compiled for a previous competition at http://www.talis.com/tdn/competition_sources
• More about data munging is at http://codekata.pragprog.com/2007/01/kata_four_data_.html

Looking for ideas? Check out previous competitions and entries

• The 6 commended entries to the JISC activity data competition – http://www.sero.co.uk/jisc-mosaic-visions.html,
• Dev8D – http://wiki.2011.dev8d.org/w/Bounties, http://wiki.2010.dev8d.org/w/Bounties, http://dev8d.org/dev8d-2009/
• Open Repositories – OR08 (Southampton), OR09 (Atlanta), OR10 (Madrid), OR11(Austin)
• Linked Data Hackdays – http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/2011/01/26/linked-data-hack-days-13th-14th-january-2010-bristol/

Rules & Small Print

1. Entrants must be over 18 years of age.
2. There is no limit to the number of entries that an entrant may submit.
3. Entries may be submitted by an individual or by groups working together. In the latter case, a single email contact should be specified and any prize will be sent to this individual, with the expectation that it will be distributed amongst the group.
4. An entry will be deemed to have been submitted only when a complying email has received at joy.palmer@manchester.ac.uk by the closing date of 2359 hours (entrant local tine) on Monday 1 August 2011.
5. An eligible entry must include the following in a blog post or in a text file

Entrants(s) contact details

Introductory text including such as the data source(s) used

A link to the entry URL, which must be a web accessible application

Statement of any runtime requirements (such as browsers, Java, etc)

Any further information that might assist in making the most of the idea

1. No responsibility can be accepted for entries sent but not received.
2. Eligible entries must clearly make use of at least one of the listed data sources
3. All prizes are available to any entrant, except the competition judges.
4. None of parties involved in the Discovery programme or the DevCSI project nor the judges will be liable for any damage, loss or disappointment suffered by any person taking part or not being able to take part in this competition.
5. Competition winners may be required to take part in publicity and to share their code for re-use under an Open Source licence.
6. We reserve the right to amend these rules and prizes at any time and entry in the competition implies acceptance of these rules in their final form.
7. The decision of the judges is final.
8. United Kingdom law applies.

He went on to observe that:

“Establishing such a role may take time but, as technology is undoubtedly going to play an increasingly important role in the future of further and higher education, so must we ensure that the people who understand the technology stick around long enough to be able to contribute at this level.”

As part of our work on the DevCSI project, we are focussing on creating a collection of case studies and resources to explore this idea further. Our aim is to investigate the sorts of conditions that help institutions to foster innovative, strategic developers to deliver the best value. We will be using the results to generate best practice advice for managers to help them make the most of their local developers and for developers to focus on maximising their skills for the institutions they work for.

Local Developers Make A Difference

Over the coming weeks, we will be publishing a series of case studies focussing on specific software development work from the Universities of Kent, Cambridge, Exeter, Bristol, Leeds, Edinburgh, British Antarctic Survey, Swansea University, University of Lincoln and many more . In each of these cases, local developers have made a tangible difference to their institutions by saving time, effort and money. Their work has made a direct impact by improving the quality of service delivered to students and academics, whilst also improving internal efficiencies. We want to understand the ingredients that made this possible and highlight these so that educational institutions can make the most of the valuable resource they have invested in.

Watch out for the first of these case studies here on the DevCSI blog over the next few days.

If you are inspired by what you read or have your own positive local developer story, please contact Mahendra Mahey to share your experiences and insights. We know that developer impact and innovation is often under reported, so we are very keen to hear how you have made a difference and what kind of cultural environment enabled you to do so.

Further Information

Paul Walk and Mahendra Mahey recently presented a session at the JISC11 conference, in which they introduced many of these ideas. The materials from this session are available as a virtual goody bag at the JISC website.

The Challenge is:

Show us the future of repositories

There are two additional prizes, one for the most innovative use of the SWORD protocol and one for the most innovative use of Microsoft Technology.

For further information and clarification about the challenge, click on the Developer Challenge Tab on this blog.

As an open source software developer with an academic background, it was my very great pleasure to be introduced to the DevCSI project and the community it supports recently at Dev8D 2011. I’m the author of an open source package called Dexy which hopes to change the way developers document software, and I had the opportunity at Dev8D to introduce people to Dexy and to learn about some of the particular issues facing academic developers when it comes to documentation. I am delighted to say that as a result, I am working with Mahendra to plan some upcoming developer documentation events which we hope will bring significant benefits to developers as well as the projects they are working on.

On Wednesday at Dev8D, there was a very interesting panel discussion about issues relating to documentation. For some developers, documentation is an unpleasant and distracting task, taking them away from the programming they’d rather be doing. For others, it’s something they’d like to do more of if they could only find the time. Some felt that readable code and code comments were all that should be needed. For a passionate few, writing documentation is a core part of their programming workflow. My co-panelist Stephanie Taylor talked about her perspective as someone whose job was to try to ensure that reluctant programmers did write documentation. We also heard from some developers who want to write documentation but whose bosses didn’t see that as important enough to take the time to do it.

Most agreed that documentation was an important part of any software project, and that very few projects have enough of it. I mentioned the strategic importance of documentation to a project, documentation being an important way for other people to find out about and start using an open source project, thereby spreading the benefits of that work to a wider audience. The intrinsic benefits of documentation, such as greater efficiency when you have documented things like installation routines for yourself so you don’t have to recreate them from scratch each time, and the beneficial effects on code quality which come from the reflection brought about by the process of writing, were also discussed.

After lunch on Wednesday I gave a lightning talk about Dexy, in which I showed several examples of documents prepared with Dexy. A PDF installation guide based on a real install script, the Dexy newspaper – an actual tabloid-size newspaper written in LaTeX with many code examples, an example of developer documentation for a web application including screenshots which were backed by functional tests, and even business cards!

On the Thursday of Dev8D, we held a “Getting Started with Dexy” workshop where people got Dexy installed and running on their laptops and were able to work through some of the tutorials, with help available should they have questions or run into problems.

After these events and the discussions I had with several developers, I thought more about how to start to address some of these issues. The lack of good tools for writing documentation is, I feel, a huge piece of the puzzle. There are many excellent tools for specific types of documentation, in particular many object-oriented languages have built-in tools for writing API reference documentation (e.g. JavaDocs, RDoc, pydoc), however these tools are very specialized and don’t tend to work well for other types of documentation, such as tutorials, nor do they deal well with the fact that projects these days almost always involve more than one programming language (it would be hard to find a project that didn’t include, at minimum, a few bash scripts or some JavaScript). Dexy lets you continue to use specialized tools for some parts of your documentation, and also gives you the flexibility to write other types of documentation in different formats (tutorials, user guides, lecture notes, presentation slides, posters, even blog posts).

Other tools such as using wikis or word processors for writing documentation allow more flexibility to write different kinds of documents, but these have the drawbacks of not being literate, that is, not relating to live code. Including code by copy-and-paste is cumbersome and, of course, not easily maintainable as the code changes. These types of tools also reinforce a sense that writing documentation is “not programming”. At least building JavaDocs feels like compiling code. With Dexy, you can write literate documentation using command line tools and with your favourite text editor, so it’s stress-free and doesn’t involve a big switch from your usual working environment.

In addition to tooling, there is the question of time. It is hard to take time out of everyday development work to write documentation, regardless of how much support there is from above for this activity. And, if there is an anticipation of having to work with awkward tools, then it’s very likely you won’t get around to writing documentation until you absolutely have to.

With all this in mind, the idea of the “documentation retreat” was born. The idea is a workshop at which you have nothing to do for a few days other than write documentation. The first day would involve some Dexy tutorials so as to make it easy, fast and fun to write documentation, along with some discussions about what types of documentation should be included in a project and what tools to best use to write each of these. The rest of the workshop would involve writing documentation in an environment with technical support and an immediate opportunity for discussing any issues/questions that arise. While training and support in Dexy will be provided, participants will of course be welcome to use other tools either within or alongside Dexy if this proves to be more beneficial and provided these tools allow for the project goal of long-term maintainability to be met. By the end of the workshop, participants will have a great toolkit for writing documentation, as well as a significant quantity of maintainable, high-quality documentation already written. Once this initial hurdle has been met, it is hoped that it will then be significantly easier to maintain documentation over time, and with the adoption of a tool such as Dexy, to make writing documentation an integral part of the programming process, much like testing has become for many people.

Speaking with Mahendra, we began to plan just such a ‘documentation retreat’, which is provisionally scheduled for 21-23 June 2011. Please keep an eye on this blog for further announcements and registration information for this June event, from which we expect developers to leave with a significant part of their documentation done for a chosen project.

Initially, there will be a one-day workshop to be held on April 5 in Bath. This event will be a pilot for the main event and will also be used to train additional facilitators who will assist with training and troubleshooting at the main event.

At this point, we are inviting you to complete the form below if you would like to be considered for the pilot which will be held in Bath on 5 April 2011. The deadline for completing this form is Monday, 7 March 2011. This event will be free and we have a maximum of five places available. After completing the pilot course you should have a good start on documentation for your project and also have a new toolkit which will help you to complete your documentation and then maintain it over time. Part of the ‘deal’ will be that those attending the early-access pilot will then act as facilitators for the much bigger ‘documentation retreat’ to be held between 21-23 June 2011.  We recommend that if you are interested in attending the pilot you need to meet the following criteria:

• You work or have worked in or with UK Further or Higher Education as a developer
• You are completely comfortable working at the command line
• You have some documentation to do and you are *interested* in doing documentation
• You enjoy helping others and you are patient
• You are available to attend the workshop scheduled for 21-23 June 2011 (location TBD) and you are willing to act as a facilitator at this event.

Please complete the registration form here if you meet the criteria and would like to apply for a place. Don’t worry if you are not picked for the pilot, you will still be able to come to the ‘retreat’ in June. As mentioned, keep an eye on this blog for further updates and registration information. In the mean time of course, feel free to explore Dexy on your own!

• Rob Allen
• Miro Keller
• Asif Akram
• Mark MacGillivray
• Hugh Glaser

The workshop will enable developers to work with researchers from any discipline. This could be to provide extra development effort on interesting open-development projects, partnering with research groups or simply attracting users for the software that has been developed. Each developer will report back about their experiences via the DevCSI and Software Sustainability Institute blogs.

As part of this work Evidence Base is aiming to gather the views of a selection of stakeholders relevant to the work of DevCSI. One way in which we are doing this is by conducting a survey with members of stakeholder groups including developers, users (academics, researchers, librarians), managers, funders and vendors.

We are interested in your views and invite you to complete the survey before 30th November: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/devcsi

All completed survey responders have the option of entering a prize draw to win a £50 Amazon voucher.

Thanks for your participation and good luck in the prize draw!

Please pass on the link to the survey if you know of others who may be interested.

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.

Panel of judges (left to right) Andrew McGregor, Sarah Shreeves, Hannah Payne, Wolfram Hortsmann, Paul Walk (Chair of Judges) and the audience for the 'Developer Challenge - Show and Tell'.

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!).

Audience at the conference dinner waiting for the announcement of the winner of the Developer Challenge

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

Rory McNicholl and Richard Davis winners of the Developer Challenge at Open Repositories 2010 (Madrid) both from the University of London Computer Centre.

Andrew McGregor presenting the winners of the Developer Challenge at Open Repositories 2010 (Madrid) to Rory McNicholl and Richard Davis at the conference dinner

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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

Sam Adams runner up at the Developer Challenge

Sam Adams announced as runner up at the Developer Challenge

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Video of Sam presenting his pitch

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Interview of Sam talking about his entry

Podcast of interview

Honourable Mention

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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

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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’

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Presentation Bram gave at Open Repositories.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

A screen cast demo from Stijn Van der Wielen

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

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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

ULCC Developer Challenge Entry - Screenshot 1: EPrints Abstract page with added links generated dynamically by mapping embedded RDFa metadata to an external list of relevant services

ULCC Developer Challenge Entry - Screenshot 2: EPrints Abstract page with added links generated dynamically by mapping embedded RDFa metadata to an external list of relevant services

ULCC Developer Challenge Entry at OR10 - Screenshot 3: EPrints Abstract page with added links generated dynamically by mapping embedded RDFa metadata to an external list of selected services

Curated list of Target Services in Google Spreadsheet

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

There is just over a week to go before Open Repositories 2010 in Madrid, are you going?

If you are, are you entering for the “Developer Challenge’? Remember you don’t have to be a developer to be involved. We want developers and non developers together in teams entering this year’s challenge.

A quick reminder as to what the challenge is:

“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”

(for more information: http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/or10dev/)

We need you to tell us if you are entering the challenge!

You can do this by posting the title of your challenge entry (this can change when you get to Madrid) and your team members to the OR10 Crowdvine site – http://or10.crowdvine.com/posts/11256849 . If you aren’t a member, you will need to register first.

You can work on your entry before the event though we also have a great ‘Developer’s Lounge‘ prepared for you when you arrive at the conference, between Tuesday 6th and Wednesday 7th of July which has a space for brain storming ideas, practicing your pitches and areas to relax and discuss ideas.

Remember the deadline to enter the challenge will be after lunchtime on Wednesday 7th July and later we will be asking people to present/pitch their entries to an audience around 1730 where refreshments will be available. A prize of 2000 euros will be awarded to the winners and runners up later at the evening dinner the same night.

See you in Madrid.