Dave Hagen
Senior research fellow, University of Bolton

What are you hoping to gain from today?

I want to get some more interaction with the open source community so I want to see other people in the same kind of situation as us. We’re software developers and we develop closed source projects from open source tools and we felt that we aren’t engaging with the open source community at all really. We’re at the stage where we really want to engage.

What’s been stopping you engaging?

I think it’s the fear factor. We have had some interaction but it’s been quite negative – just “read the manual” kind of thing – so we haven’t found the pussycats yet!

What would be a good outcome for you from today?

More contacts in the open source community, so this is more of a networking opportunity for us, I believe. And also to hear other people’s experiences of developing software in the community.

Kirk Barron
Software developer, University of Bolton

I develop interfaces within a small software team. I work on interfaces, user experience and usability.

What are you hoping to get out of today?

For me, and I think the team, we want to connect with other developers and see if they’ve got the same problem we have, which it seems that they do because I’ve spoken to a few guys and a lot of us are in the same position where you develop some software, you think you’ve connected with the users credibly, you’ve met usability requirements, everything is done right through the whole web cycle, and then the project ends and nothing happens and it disappears. I think everybody’s trying to find a way to go from there – how we can continue to develop and improve what we’re doing and continue with the projects.

Are you involved in any open software communities?

No, this is our first foray into it really. We have developed software with open source tools and considered ourselves as open source developers but, as Scott aid, you realise you’re not really because there aren’t any contributions from anyone else outside the institution. So we think we’re an open source team and we’d like to be but, despite what’s been said about them being pussycats, I think a lot of them in universities and colleges are and are quite pleasant but I think often when you try to communicate with people you’ve never met before, over the internet, it changes how people respond to you.

How are you hoping to overcome that fear of the community?

It’s not so much fear as about being practical, really. It’s about getting the response you need to get and I think it’s about approaching it from a different direction, a different avenue, so it’s about speaking to other developers from other universities, as we’re in groups like this where it’s friendly and more accessible and then you establish relationships that way and then engage on the internet.

Russell Newman and Sebastian Skuse
Research Assistants, University of Southampton

Some of the folks in our lab in Southampton have had contact with OSS Watch so we thought we’d come along and see what’s happening because we’ve heard a lot about open source. We’ve recently got into a few projects that are open source and it’s the first time we’ve done it so we figured it would be a good idea to come along and see what it’s all about and hear the different views from the community.

What are you getting out of the day?

We’ve found out that the whole open source thing is a lot bigger than we realised before, Before, when we would talk about open source people were pushing us to open source our projects and a lot of that has been… superficial evangelism, I think is the best word! We’ve realised it’s not so black and white – the way we were taught about open source was that it was either closed source or open source whereas we’ve finished a project which is open source in the sense that people can download it but we’re the only people who are committing to it – as one of the speakers here described. It was interesting to hear that that was actually quite a common occurance rather than something which has just come from us working in an academic environment.

In terms of what we’ve learned about OSS Watch, we have found out that it is more than just superficial evangelism! We have found out that there is a lot more to open source and that it is feasible. Previously we’d open source for open source sake, just to keep people happy. Whereas actually it could be useful for maintaining our projects in the future, especially one that is very much dependent on the climate of the browser market. It’s a web-based project so it’s going to need updating in the future and the money will run out at some point.

We’ve learned a lot more about why we may want to properly open source our products, and about how it works in very large and very public projects as well. We’ve been involved in much smaller things, and things that have been controlled by academic institutions rather than the Apache Foundation.

Ivi Juliane Paduim-Quan
North Somerset Council Community Leaning Team

I’m an e-learning coordinator and I update our Moodle to make to more interesting for our users. I don’t develop any software, I just use it!

I’m here to find out about how I could use open source software with our learners. I don’t know anything about the code or anything like that but it’s nice to know how it’s done and what work is involved.

The best experience of today has been networking and I found some people willing to help me with things that I’m stuck with which means that my Moodle is not up to scratch yet. I met some people working in the voluntary sector which said that they could come to visit me, and we can visit them to see what they are doing.

It’s inspiring to see people like Ian who are doing really bright stuff. We’re definitely going to be doing more open source stuff now – I’ve already signed up for Sakai, while he was talking! And Scott is going to give me a hand with what he’s working with because it sounds very good, very interactive which is exactly what I need for the kinds of students I work with.

The event is free and to book your place, please visit the event website for further information and a booking form.

(Tag for the event is #deveng09)

The workshop will attempt to explain how developers engaged in making modifications, customisations and amendments  to open source software might make their contributions to a project.  There are three main speakers:

Scott Wilson – will be talking about Wookie –  an open source Widget engine (based on the W3C Widgets specification) and a number of plugins for popular web applications such as WordPress.

Dr Ian Botson – will give an account of how the Sakai project engages with open source communities. Ian will argue that using open source is very easy. However, what is harder is influencing a sustainable community based on merit and he will contend that this really requires a different way of thinking. Ian will also talk about his involvment in the devlopment of Sakai 3, the decisions and dilemmas it gave him and how this led to his involvement in Apache.

Mark Johnson will give an overview of his involvement in the core development of Moodle and discuss the advantages of this process to a developer, their respective employer, and the developer community as a whole, see:

The event will end with a plenary session and conclusion.

Paul Walk will be attending from DevCSI together with blogger and journalist Michelle Pauli. We hope to provide a report of the event which may include some interviews with some key people via this blog.

A very useful reading list has been provided by the event organisers.

There will also be a live blog on the day to cover the event.

If any of you reading this end up going to the event, it would be great to hear your thoughts and feedback of what you hear via the event blog, your own blog, tweets, other kinds of web postings, or even as a reply to this posting.