After much deliberation, the winners of the DevCSI Open Repositories 2012 Developer Challenge have been decided…
 

Winner

 
Patrick McSweeney, University of Southampton
 
 
 
 
 

Idea:

 
Data Engine
 
McSweeney’s idea involves a set of tools which turn a repository into a data management and visualisation suite with a simple provenence model.

The suite would provide conversion tools to convert scientific data from lab equipment into CSV. CSV can be loaded into a temporary database where querys can be run through a web front end to create derived CSVs from existing data. The repository would catalog how files were derived from source data and what queries were used to do this. CSV can then be visualised in the suite using a range of visualisation tools, including D3 JS. He demonstrated a number of these visualisations in his pitch.
 
Patrick gave us a quick video interview describing his idea…

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video is also available on Vimeo.
 

Judges Comments:

 
This was new and cool, and sits along side a number of other efforts in this area, so the judges hope to see this developed further along with some standards.
 

Runner Up/Microsoft Challenge

 
Keith Gilbertson and Linda Newman
 

Idea:

 
MATS: Mobile Audio Transcription and Submission?
 
Gilbertson’s original idea involved an electronic device to be used by historians, archivists, and others who work with audio transcripts. The device would record an audio file, and then deposit it into a repository, where it is automatically transcribed. After speaking with other developers, the idea was refined to extend last year’s SWORD mobile phone app. Users will be able to choose between Microsoft Research MAVIS and Amazon Mechanical Turk Transcription to automatically transcribe the audio recording.
 

Judges Comments:

 
This entry not only showed something of general repository community, it also embodied a lot of what we wanted to see around the challenge. They came with an idea, talked to other developers to flesh it out and then presented it. The idea also made the best use of a Microsoft technology, so it won the Microsoft Challenge prize of a .Net Gadgeteer kit.
 

Honourable Mention

 
Mark MacGillivray and Richard Jones, Cottage Labs
 

Idea:

 
Getting Academics Closer to Repositories
 
MacGillivray and Jones proposed a javascript widget that can be easily embedded by an academic on their own web pages that automatically tracks their submissions to their repo, and provides useful statistics whilst also linking out to other cool sources of information. They demonstrated the basics of this, and described how they would develop this further.
 
Mark gave us a quick video interview describing the idea in more detail…

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video is also available on Vimeo.
 

Honourable Mention

 
Ben O’Steen and Cameron Neylon, Cottage Labs and Science and Technology Facilities Council
 

Idea:

 
Is this research readable?
 
We spend a lot of time arguing over whether people have access, should have access, would have access if they knew how to get it. Why don’t we actually just find out whether people really do have access to the published literature from where they sit when they’re doing their work? O’Steen and Neylon have designed a survey in which we functionally check whether a human being thinks they have access to a given work we can look at how access, and its lack, effects the daily work of people interested in research. This will provide a dataset on access that can be used to support policy development and further technical work.
 

Featured image by Adam Field

Watch the session in full…

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video is also available on Vimeo.

The session was also expertly live blogged by Nicola Osborne.
 

Entrants

 
We had a record number of entries this year – 29 in total! Of these, 19 were refined throughout the event and went on to be pitched at the final session.
 
Splinter by Matt R Taylor

MATS: Mobile Audio Transcription and Submission by Keith Gilbertson and Linda Newman

Dusting Off The Mothballs by Joonas Kesäniemi and Kevin Van de Velde

Inter Repository Text by Tomasz Rosiek, Łukasz Wasilewski, Wojciech Sylwestrzak, Jakub Jurkiewicz

Repository Based Version Control, Asger Askov Blekinge

Data Engine by Patrick McSweeney

Cross-Repository Mobile Application by Petr Knoth*

Getting Academics Closer to Repositories by Mark MacGillivray and Richard Jones

Repository Ram-Raid by Ben O’Steen

How To Stop An Echo Fading by Les Carr

Redundancy at the File and Network Level to Protect Data by Jimmy Tang

Fedora Object Locking by Asger Askov Blekinge

Shield by Graham Trigg

Machine and User-Friendly “Policy-fying” by Jose Martin

Linking CRISes to Research Discovery by Steffen Godskesen, Rikke Willer and Christian Tonsberg

Repository Analytics by Petr Knoth*

Visualising Repositories in the Real World by Julie Allison and Ben O’Steen

A Thing of Dreams: A Time Machine by Dave Tarrant

Is this research readable? by Cameron Neylon and Ben O’Steen
 
* = Not included in video footage at speaker’s request
 
 
A big thank you to all of those who entered the challenge this year, and to those who helped the developers to refine their ideas throughout the event.

 
We’ve received some really exciting entries to this year’s Open Repositories Developer Challenge, and we are very much looking forward to hearing the entrants pitch to our panel of judges at 5pm on Wednesday 11th July.

If you are pitching an idea, here are a ten top tips to help you impress the judges:
 

1. Focus 100% on who you are talking to, their interests and their technical level.
 
 

2. What does your project do to change your core audience’s lives for the better? In marketing terms: what is your ‘unique selling point’? This is your core message – so stick to it!
 
3. Write down key points within your core message, and keep them short, snappy, simple but not stupid.
 
4. Avoid jargon! It is almost always a barrier to your audience’s understanding.
 
5. Be confident and believe fully in what you are saying.
 
6. Practice, practice, practice!
 
7. Don’t use distracting gimmicks.
 
8. Look at the camera as if you were looking at someone in the eyes.
 
9. Speak clearly, check your audience can hear you if it is a large room and pause to take a breath if you feel yourself beginning to speak too quickly or jabber.
 
10. Test it on a stranger and address any weak points in your delivery.
 

Remember, the Developer Lounge is available for you to practice in front of an audience or to get advice from the organisers and judges.

 
 
We’ve received a record number of ideas for this year’s DevCSI Open Repositories Developer Challenge. Over the next seven and a half hours, the entrants will be working on their ideas to refine them, and in some cases write the code to start making their ideas a reality.

If you have a red, yellow or green dot on your badge, pop up to the Developer Lounge to chat to the developers to listen to their ideas and to give them some feedback and encouragement.
 
 
 
 

Judgement Time

 
At 5pm today everyone is invited to hear the challenge entrants pitch their ideas in front of our panel of judges.

There will beer. And nibbles.

In return, we want YOU to vote for your favourite pitch. Your votes will be taken into account by the judges when calculating the final scores for each pitch. The winners will be announced at the conference dinner later this evening.
 
So, come along to Lecture Theatre 4 to hear what’s new and cool in the world of Open Repositories.

Entries for the Developer Challenge have now closed, but if you are a developer and you’re looking for ideas to solve that would make the world of open repositories a better place, here are a few for you to chew over…
 

Idea 1

Could we have a widget/dashboard for an EPrints repository [which may be part of MePrints or a wholly separate plugin] which could pull together information for an author/depositor about their publications profile in the repository, ideally visually (graph?) so for instance the total number of papers, the percentage of particular types of paper, a breakdown by year, an indication of the other parts of the institution they co-author the most with. It could also pull together available information such as access and full text/downloads (or identify where there are full text gaps) as well as citation data. Much of this data already exists but being able to unify it and visually display would be very useful/interesting for authors.
 

Contact

William Nixon (@williamjnixon)
 

Idea 2

In the light of the Finch Report, could a developer build a mechanism whereby a deposit into a repository triggers a workflow for submitting and paying for Gold OA. In other words, bringing the repository into the Gold OA process and adding value to this.
 

Contact

Chris Awre (@clawre)
 

Idea 3

Could a developer pick up on William’s dashboard idea, but apply this to data, such that a display presents information on what data is stored, where it is stored (local, off-site, cloud, etc.) and relevant tasks/workflow steps required to guide ongoing management.
 

Contact

Chris Awre (@clawre)
 

Idea 4

Could a developer produce a widget to give users the code to more easily embed an object (image, pdf, audio or video — would have to be a recognized file format or mime type) in their own web page? Give the user options for including limited metadata in that embedded view?
 

Contact

Linda Newman
 

Idea 5

What might be possible to support a ‘drag and drop’ interface from a researcher’s desktop to our repositories? (This idea may not be completely new, but possibly worth re-visiting with current tools?)
 

Contact

Linda Newman
 

Idea 6

Can a developer come up with a way that a digital repository can easily ingest a copy of a particular version of a piece of software that is stored in a public code repository (e.g. GitHub, SourceForge), in such a way that common metadata like copyright owner, license, contributors, and dependencies are correctly recorded.
 

Contact

Neil Chue Hong (@npch)
 

Idea 7

Can a developer come up with a way for a digital repository that has ingested a copy of a piece of software to run provided tests to assess the point when the software becomes obsolescent.
 

Contact

Neil Chue Hong (@npch)
 

Here’s a quick introduction to our panel of expert judges…

Peter Sefton

 
Peter Sefton has ten year’s experience in senior roles in and around Higher Education and research on systems, policy and change management to support research and learning. He is plugged into networks of practitioners, theorists and developers in a broad range of scholarly technologies including institutional repositories, web publishing and research data management. He also has experience leading software development and his own technical skills include document processing in JavaScript / JQuery, PHP, Python, XML, XSLT, Java and C#.

For more information about Peter, visit his blog.
 

Joss Winn

 
Joss Winn is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Educational Research and Development at the University of Lincoln, where he co-ordinates the work of LNCD, a cross-university group interested in technology for education, and manages a number of research and development projects. Previously, he held posts as Audiovisual Archivist at Amnesty International, Project Manager for Amnesty’s Digital Asset Management system and worked in Collections Management as Moving Image Archivist at the BFI National Film and Television Archive.

For more information about Joss, visit his homepage.
 

Bill Anderson

 
Bill Anderson has worked at the Georgia Tech Library for five years as either a Digital Library Developer, a Software Engineer, or a Systems Analyst, depending on who’s in charge of Human Resources at any given time. This is his fifth Open Repositories conference. In the past, he has worked in various IT-related capacities at Duke University, Nando Media, and Intercontinental Hotels, where he was briefly in charge of Holly the Holiday Inn Robot. Participants interested in bribing Mr. Anderson would do well to keep in mind his deep love of single malt whisky.
 

Balviar Notay

 
Balviar Notay is a JISC Programme Manager focussed on digital infrastructure, including digital repositories.

For more information about Balviar, visit her JISC profile page.
 
 
 
 
 

Ben Ryan

 
Dr. Ben Ryan joined Jorum as the Technical Development Manager early in 2012, coming from the University of Leeds. With a Ph.D. in Computer Science, he’s worked as a Software Developer and consultant for a specialised typesetting and printing company, focusing on automated workflows for the production of printed and online academic journals an Ed tech working on LOM metadata, learning objects and specifications relating to electronic learning production and delivery; a technical director of a company developing delivery systems for online learning, as well as a Technical Officer for an ESRC funded qualitative longitudinal social science project responsible for achiving social science data. Ben is also an allotmenteer, fungalist, pizza oven pimper and specialist in building Heath Robinson style greenhouses.
 

Adam Soroka

Adam Soroka is a senior engineer at the University of Virginia Library, where he has been working with repository technologies since the turn of the century. He is a Fedora Commons committer and has presented on Fedora systems design, geospatial data repositories, and digital humanities work at conferences such as OR, DLF, Digital Humanities, and Code4lib. He is particularly excited about this years’ OR theme and eager to see DevCSI Developer Challenge entries that address it.
 

Alex Wade

 
Alex Wade is Director for Scholarly Communication at Microsoft Research, where he oversees a portfolio of research-focused products and services. Alex holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from U.C. Berkeley, and a Masters of Librarianship degree from the University of Washington. During his career at Microsoft, Alex has managed the corporate search and taxonomy management services; has shipped a SharePoint-based document and workflow management solution for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance; and served as Senior Program Manager for Windows Search. Prior to joining Microsoft, Alex was Systems Librarian at the University of Washington, and held technical library positions at the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley.

Sarah Shreeves

 
Sarah Shreeves is currently the Coordinator for the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS), a set of services and collections supporting scholarly communication (including the institutional repository) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also the co-Coordinator for the Scholarly Commons, a space for expert, interdisciplinary research support services and open workshops for faculty and graduate students to develop skills in areas such as digital content creation, e-learning and teaching, working with digital repositories, curation of research data, understanding copyright issues and author rights, and working with geospatial and numeric data.

For more information about Sarah, visit her online CV.
 

If you haven’t entered the challenge yet but have a great idea, get across to our ideas page and get your entry in quick. Once you have entered an idea, you are free to refine it and practice your pitch with others in the Developer Lounge on the mezzanine level of the Appleton Tower.

Wondering what we’re looking for?

We can exclusively reveal our judging criteria to help you craft your idea throughout the day!

We will be looking for evidence of…

• Innovation
• Vision
• Relevance to user problems
• Coolness
• Usability
• Plausibility for adoption/technical implementation
• Functionality
• Overall fit to the challenge
• Audience vote

Once you have entered your initial idea, you are free to refine and craft it as much as you want before pitching it in front of our judges. You can work on your idea in our Developer Lounge, where you can practice pitching it in front of others and get advice from our judging team to make your idea even better.

Remember, the deadline for entries has been extended to 4pm TODAY (10th July) so you need to get your initial idea up on our ideas page pretty quick.

You have probably heard about our DevCSI Open Repositories 2012 Developer Challenge but that’s not the only thing we will be getting up to at Open Repositories 2012 next week…
 

The Developer Workspace

 
If you are attending OR12 and are part of the Developer Challenge, why not enjoy the specially prepared ‘Developer Workspace’ which is comfortable, has good wireless and power to help you develop your winning entry at the conference.
 
 
 
We are organising some presentations from previous winners in this room, and there will be opportunities to speak to judges and previous prize winners who can give feedback about your entries. Also there will be time to practice your ‘pitch’ to others.

The “Developer Workspace” will be on the first floor of the Appleton Tower, so just follow the signs. The room will be available from Tuesday 10th July to Thursday 12th July 2012. The Developer Workspace will open at 10am each day.

The lounge is intended to support those who are entering the challenge. You can treat this place as your ‘base’ for the event and you can use it as a chance to talk to other developers, exchange ideas, talk tech, get advice etc. The room will have flip charts, a projector, wireless, lots of power sockets, a pitching area, video cameras, etc. Basically, it will be designed for geeks! There is an adjoining room where you will be able to get coffee, snacks and refreshments.

The workspace is a ‘flexible’ space, so you are encouraged to attend other exciting parts of the conference if you so wish and even promote your entry to other delegates whilst you are out and about.
 

Server Space

 
NeCTAR is partnering with Australian institutions and research organisations to create, for the first time, a national research cloud for Australian researchers. They are kindly offering server space for Developers wanting to work on challenges for Open Repositories 12. Please let us know if you require server space.
 

The DevCSI OR 2012 Developer Challenge

 
If you haven’t entered our Developer Challenge yet, make sure you get your idea to us before Tuesday 10th July. See our Developer Challenge page for full details of how to get involved.

Cross-posted from the OR 2012 blog.
 
The developer challenge isn’t just for developers anymore. It doesn’t matter if you speak Perl or Ruby or if you bash your Fedora, so long as you speak repository. We want curators, managers, and users of every sort to join. It takes all kinds to make great new toys, so you should consider signing up and pitching an idea. If metadata gets you going, or if you revel in getting your hands dirty with big data sets, there’s no better place to be this Tuesday night than the developer challenge at OR2012.
 
 
 

You don’t even have to worry about making it work yet, though it certainly wouldn’t hurt. Just refine your idea a bit and get ready to talk about it. On Tuesday all of the challengers will get together and shout it out, airing their plans and giving each other feedback.Then you’ve got just under a day to make any finishing touches before presenting to an audience and judging panel on Wednesday night at 5:00pm.
 

To the victor go the spoils

 
Funding, vouchers, widgets, and the attention of the entire conference on Thursday morning are all up for grabs. Not too shabby. So head over to the DevCSI challenge page to iron out the details, then submit your idea in the comments of the entry page before Tuesday 10th July.
 

Need some inspiration?

 
We’ve got just the thing – here are a few prize winners from OpenRepo DevCSI challenges in 2009 and 2011.
 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.