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:

• a barcamp event being organised by the
• List8D developers from the University of Kent
• a suggestion from Gobe Hobona of Nottingham University to convene a workshop around BPEL and tools to support its development and use – this suggestion came out of discussion following a presentation from Ian Ibbotson of Knowledge Integration
• a possibility of working with Andy Cobley of Dundee University who is doing some inspiring things with ‘hackdays’ for students there
• an event with a focus on female developers (there is all kinds of cultural male-bias in the developer community generally – in the HE sector we should, frankly, raise our game in this respect). We have a suggestion of a very interesting sounding and appropriate venue in Manchester
• working with OSS Watch on a developer event around Wookie

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.

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:

• face-to-face networking, development and learning opportunities for developers. The Developer Happiness Days event is a significant example of this category and will be run again in the Spring of 2010
• training opportunities (both technical and non-technical) for developers
• smaller, more ‘agile’ events in the nature of barcamps, sponsored and supported by this project but largely organised by the community
• technical prototyping events, aimed at addressing pressing technical issues identified by the JISC and the community
• show-case/demonstration events, where technical innovation can be presented to non-developer ‘audiences’

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.