In the third of our series of guest posts about the SSI Collaboration Workshop, we hear from freelance web developer Anna Powell-Smith, who shares her tips following the workshop.
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I recently attended the Collaborations Workshop as a supported developer: thanks to SSI for organising a very interesting two days.

I’m a freelance web developer, and I came to the Collaborations Workshop partly to show off my Open Domesday project, the first free online copy of Domesday Book. But I also came to learn about the cutting edge of software in British academia, and observe the challenges that academics face when producing open data and open source code.

After a thought-provoking series of workshops, discussions and lightning talks, I could write a long, reflective post about the nature of programming within academia, and how to create the incentives needed for research to produce great software as well as great papers.

However, I found that the most productive discussions I had over the course of the workshop were highly practical. So I thought I would share some services that I use as a developer, and that – based on my observations over the workshop – might provide simple, tangible benefits for technically-minded academics too.

Tip 1: Sharing knowledge though QA

I use the question-answering StackOverflow day in, day out to help me code. I couldn’t be a developer without it. It struck me that many academic disciplines might like a similar community question-answering board – where users can ask questions, vote for the best answer, and award other users points for helping out.

Luckily, setting up your own system is straightforward. One option is StackExchange, the software that powers StackOverflow. StackExchange is already setting up a bunch of communities based on its software – there’s an active maths site, and proposals for others ranging from neuroinformatics to paleontology that you can support.

If you’d rather roll your own site, there’s OSQA. This is a free, open-source clone of the StackExchange software, easy for any sysadmin to set up.

Tip 2: Productivity and collaboration

Just three small, but hopefully useful, recommendations:

• If This Then That lets you glue web services together. Say you want to post your group’s Twitter updates automatically to Facebook: it can do that. Or get an email or SMS update whenever an RSS feed updates: it can do that too. It’s simple and brilliant.
• People think GitHub is for managing code, which it is, but you can use its issue-tracker to manage any kind of collaborative project, not just software. Try Unfuddle or Sifter.
• Doodle helps organise meetings at a time to suit everyone. Do not underestimate its power.

Tip 3: Becoming a coder

Workshop participants talked about the importance of teaching everyone to code. (Hear hear!) I recommend the white-hot Codecademy, which offers a series of browser-based JavaScript lessons. I also like CodeSchool for more experienced developers.

If you already have HTML and CSS skills but struggle to get sites looking professional, the new and very exciting Twitter Bootstrap is your friend. It’s a collection of flexible, adaptable design elements that massively simplify the process of putting a site together.

Tip 4: The open data community

Finally, academics interested in collaboration and open data might like to know about the Open Knowledge Foundation and its work promoting open science:

• The Science Code Manifesto calls for better credit and citation systems for code created during research.
• The Panton Principles are a manifesto for open scientific data.
• The Panton Fellowships support scientists who actively promote open data (this year’s applications now closed).

The Open Science Working Group is the starting point for all the OKFN’s campaigns on open data, open access and open research: join us there.

In the second of our series of guest posts from the SSI Collaboration Workshop, we hear from Mark Woodbridge of Imperial College, who reflects on his own career and his personal experiences of many of the issues raised by the workshop.

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This year will mark my tenth anniversary as a software developer, most of which I have spent in academia. I started out developing a web application in Java using Eclipse on Linux. This much hasn’t changed, despite the rise of Android, NoSQL, HTML5, DVCS and many other technologies and tools. Neither have the basic principles of software architecture, testing, and usability. So I’m lucky that I was encouraged to pick up good habits at the start of my career.

But there have been other invariants. I’m still not sure whether I’m really a post-doc or a member of staff, whether I’m a researcher, an engineer or a programmer, and how my career should develop accordingly. As a computer scientist, I still often feel completely unqualified to communicate effectively with specialists in the department in which I work. And I still do a bad job of explaining my job to friends and family, who assume that all IT people in universities either lecture on programming or fix computers.

Initiatives such as the Software Sustainability Institute and DevCSI (thanks to JISC and the EPSRC) cannot by themselves solve these problems, but they can make a huge difference not only in pursuing their stated goals (such as promoting best practice, building communities around software and promoting the use of local developers) but, as part of this process, providing developers with the tools and resources necessary to advance their own work and careers. This must involve taking the initiative and proving to their institutions that they can cost-effectively develop flexible, high-quality software that exceeds users’ expectations. Having achieved this the results must be shared and promoted to build a positive feedback loop that inspires more faith from universities and funding bodies.

The Collaborations Workshop, which I attended with the generous support of the DevCSI project, is a unique event in providing a discussion forum for all these issues. It’s a developer event that importantly isn’t a hackfest – instead its objective is to encourage collaborative funding applications. However, for me it was about meeting people (invariably experienced, knowledgeable and inspiring) and finding that they struggle with the same things, namely job security, promoting their software, keeping up to date and getting recognition. And I think the best thing we can do, in the spirit of the workshop, is at least try to form longstanding, informal collaborations where we begin to work on solutions to these issues.

For me the foundation of these collaborations are built through discussion (and some serendipity), and the best way to enable this is by getting people together with diverse backgrounds but the same interests, and to let them set the agenda. This was definitely the case in Oxford. The Collaborative Ideas and Break-out sessions were the perfect format: the Five Important Things list generated by the groups should be valuable to anyone working on academic software, and the Lightning Talks slides are a really interesting snapshot of the varied research and backgrounds of the attendees. This is the best reason for attending again next year – the workshop provides an opportunity to learn a huge amount in a very short time about relevant projects, technologies, initiatives, and, most importantly, other developers. This is the knowledge that enables developers to work more productively and justify their role in enabling and supporting research in academia and beyond.

• 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.