You can find our more about the event at the event webpage and read the full coverage from the event at on their live blog. Gabriel Hanganu also provides a useful overview of the issues in this blog post about the event.

The event led to a number of really useful conversations, including discussions with the OMELETTE project and John Wards from PhoneGap. We’d like to thank the organisers for gathering together such an interesting group of people and speakers.

It has been over a year since DevCSI last ran a mobile web hack event, and the discussions at Open Source Junction 3 have inspired us to revisit the area. Of particular interest is the growing strength of tools like PhoneGap that make mobile web development easier help those on the fringes of web development (with a knowledge of HTML and CSS) to build mobile sites.

We are in the early planning stages at the moment, but if you like to contribute by giving a lightning talk or suggesting particular issues you think it would be useful to cover at such an event, then please leave a comment or send a tweet to @devcsi.

Let’s stop reinventing the wheel and share the code we develop to make institutional systems talk to each other.

If you work for a University as a developer you’re probably very familiar with the scenario that “we have just bought product X, which will need to talk to products Y and Z”. There are lots of well established institutional systems such as Library management systems, Finance systems, HR systems, Student Records systems, Virtual Learning Environments, and so on. Heck – there are even email and calendar / online collaboration suites too

As a developer, you’re accustomed to Googling around to figure out how to do things and solve tricky problems. Sites like Stack Overflow help enormously here, but there’s a whole class of stuff that is quite hard to search for – enterprise packages. Aside from a few enlightened cases (e.g. Google Apps API forum posts), there either isn’t a body of sample code to draw upon, or it’s hidden away behind corporate Extranets.

So, I’d like to snarf a chunk of the JISC Elevator Pitch funding to try a little experiment to open source some of this systems integration code. Here’s a short video that explains how I envisage this working:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch this video on YouTube.

If successful, I think this little project would help to get institutions thinking about sharing code more generally, and perhaps even move us a little bit closer to a “University API” that exposes say “Finance system functions” rather than “Agresso Finance System functions”, and would permit institutions to move between systems whilst retaining a common API layer. Much of the prior work in this area has been top down, but I suspect a bottom up approach would be more likely to succeed.

I see this as a natural DevCSI project, since participants in DevCSI already “get it” and understand the benefits that accrue from sharing code – particularly around rapid development, pooling expertise, and avoiding unnecessary duplication of effort. As part of the project we would organise a workshop under the DevCSI banner for all those interested in opening up their institutional systems integration code. This would provide an opportunity to agree a common approach to code sharing (e.g. choice of license), and also give people an opportunity to share hints and tips for successful promotion at each others’ institutions.

If you like the sound of what you’re hearing – vote for me! (Note: ac.uk email address required for this)

Mahey provided a background to the DevCSI project and discussed the roles developers may take within the education sector, observing that the project was effectively born from a need for greater support for developers to help them get together and share ideas, experience and knowledge. He described some of the ways in which the DevCSI project has enabled developers to get together from across different domains to stimulate innovation since 2009, and provided examples some of the positive outcomes we have seen as a result.

“The universities that are going to survive austere times are the ones that are able to innovate.”

Mahey also got to discuss Dev8D and the various challenges DevCSI supports, including the Open Repositories developer challenge, and gave us a sneaky insight into the planning process for this year’s challenge.

You can hear the whole interview here: Ubuntu Radio DevCSI Interview.
The full episode is available here.

The meet up is taking place at Ghillie Dhu next Tuesday, 13th March from 7pm and will feature talks on the Public Domain Review, the Open Data Handbook, CKAN, and Open Biblio.

If you are interested in seeing what the OKFN are up to, or talking open data / knowledge in general, do come along. This promises to be a great opportunity for Edinburgh-based folk (and some from further afield) to get together to discuss ideas, projects and generally set the world to rights.

If you would like to talk about a particular area of open data or related subjects, then take a look at the Open Knowledge Foundation blog for more details.

You can sign up for the event at Meetup.com.
The event hash tag is #OpenDataEDB.

If you are interested in other OKFN events, take a look at the contact info [@] okfn.org <http://okfn.org>.

The event is designed to bring together estates managers and ICT practitioners to help identify the opportunities and barriers that exist around the greater use of information and communication technologies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of university and college estates in terms of their costs, energy consumption and carbon emissions. The workshop builds on a presentation by Rob Bristow at the DevCSI Open Data hack day and subsequent discussions about the role that local developers could play in this space.

Mahey will be putting forward the software developer’s perspective at this event and discussing how local developers can help to integrate systems and build bespoke solutions to save the institution both money and energy. This workshop will be followed in January by a Greening ICT hack event, organised in conjunction with DevCSI, which we hope will stimulate development around some of the interfaces and standards used by buildings management systems, lead to improved awareness of the issues involved, and help to build strong working relationships between developers and estates managers.

There are still places available next Tuesday if you have an interest in hearing more about the systems currently used in estates management and discussing the issues with others working in this space. You can sign up for the event here.

If you can’t make it, but do have an interest in this area, you can follow the proceedings on Twitter via the event hashtag #greeningict.

Look out for more information about the Greening ICT hack event in January, or email m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk if you are interested in speaking or taking part in this event.

The event was designed to build on the success of our annual Dev8D conference by bringing together student web developers, computer science geeks and journalism/media students for a two-day developer marathon. The students were encouraged to team up and build cool things that contribute to university life, and were rewarded with prizes sponsored by the Guardian, DevCSI, Cottage Labs, the University of Lincoln and the University of Southampton.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Over 170 students from across the UK joined us, many of whom worked right through Saturday night to create some outstanding and innovative projects. In this report we get a snapshot of the event and hear from some of the students involved…

Keynotes

Over the course of the event the students heard a series of short inspirational keynote presentations from a range of experts:

Michael Brunton-Spall
The Guardian

Brunton-Spall gave the students an overview of the data available from the Guardian, including World Government Data and the Guardian’s Open Platform. He also gave a whirlwind tour of some of the results of previous hack days to help provide some inspiration for the students as they got underway with their own projects.

“Hack days are not about taking on a massive project, but throwing something interesting together to show what can be done”

The Guardian offered a challenge at DevXS which focussed on helping to reduce the social inequality for students by rewarding the best hack produced at the event to help people from poorer backgrounds to access higher education. Brunton-Spall introduced this challenge and pointed the students towards some of the potential data sources they might want to investigate when approaching this challenge.

Phil Sturgeon
Happy Ninjas

Sturgeon gave a glimpse into his experiences as a nomadic developer travelling the US after becoming dissatisfied both with corporate life and with working by himself in the UK.

He created a tool to plan where he wanted to travel, offered his training and development services via Twitter and plotted a route between jobs. This strategy enabled him to meet with lots of Twitter contacts, attend conferences in the US and work in some random places. He took the students through the sums to show that it was actually profitable to travel and stay in hostels, compared to renting a flat and working from home. One day of work could fund three days of his trip, with a strategy typically based on a three day cycle:

• Day one: take laptop somewhere fun and work
• Day two: do something interesting, have fun
• Day three: go somewhere else

“I occasionally get chased by bears!”

To find out more, read Phil’s blog post about his presentation at DevXS.

Professor Peter McOwan
Queen Mary College, London

The students were treated to a computer magic show by Professor Peter McOwan, where he broke the magician’s code to explain how an understanding of mathematics and concepts used in computer science can account for some magical card tricks…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tony Hirst
The Open University

In his evening keynote, Hirst discussed his attitude to playing with data and the web, which is largely about building quick and simple demonstrations that encapsulate one or two ideas which then serve as memory aids for himself and teaching tools for others. This is driven by his sense of responsibility that as “computer people” we should help others use technology more easily.

“80-90% of people out there don’t know about CTRL F. Sharing these tricks will help people hate technologies less.”

He described how you can work magic very quickly and with very little effort by using combinations of freely available tools, libraries, applications and tricks. He provided examples including a mashup he created which took tabular data from Wikipedia and showed it on a map. He used this example to explain how Google Spreadsheets and Yahoo Pipes can be used to create such mashups without any code at all.

He advocated making use of Stack Overflow both by using the answers and contributing if you know an answer to share the knowledge that you’ve got. He also introduced Get the Data and The Data Hub, where you can find openly licensed data.

“Use appropriate tools and appropriate technologies: just because an application or a tool was built for one thing does not mean that’s the only way it can be used.”

Hirst concluded by giving a practical overview of a range of useful tools, including Gephi to create visualisations, ScraperWiki to scrape and process websites, Google Fusion Tables, which he described as a spreadsheet on steroids, Google Refine for cleaning up data, and his Guardian Datastore Explorer.

“You already do ‘just do it’ so now just share it!”

Richard Jones and Mark MacGillivray
Cottage Labs

Jones and MacGillivray described the concept behind an alternative way of working as a developer with the HE sector. Their partnership, Cottage Labs, is a collaboration of freelance HE developers who aim to have an impact on the world whilst doing what they love. They are all passionate about open source software, but observed that larger organisations struggle to be flexible enough to take full advantage of open source solutions, which means they can be five-six years behind the times. Cottage Labs works with organisations in HE to overcome this.

In describing their careers and their experiences since forming Cottage Labs, they distilled what they had learnt about making yourself more employable as a developer:

• People need useful things: make them and they will pay you
• Publish your code: your creative art is your CV
• Don’t stand still: if you stand still you will end up going backwards. Make sure your employer gives you time to learn new skills
• Go to events, be seen and give talks: this will help people get interested in what you’re doing and be interested in the community
• Do what you like: you must like what you’re doing, otherwise you’re going to write boring software and you won’t explore the boundaries of the problem

“By coming to DevXS you have already taken the first step in making yourself more employable.”

Lightning Talks

A core part of the philosophy behind DevXS was to encourage peer-to-peer learning and skill sharing between students. Throughout the weekend participants volunteered to give a five-minute lightning talk on a subject of their choice, which resulted in a diverse range of talks. Here is a selection of the topics covered:

Colin Dawson from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen discussed WITSML: a standard for communicating data from sensors within deep sea wells. The data from these sensors is converted into WITSML, which can then be used to dynamically generate drilling reporting charts and inform other systems. Students at Robert Gordon University have the opportunity to do placement with oil companies working in the North Sea – an experience which exposed Dawson to the WITSML standard. He emphasised that it is the general standard used by the whole oil and gas industry for data analysis, making it worthy of investigation by more students.

Jack Franklin from the University of Bath gave a brief introduction to CoffeeScript, which he described as “like JavaScript, but better.” CoffeeScript is quicker and and easier to write than JavaScript, and gets compiled into Javascript for use. Franklin explained how to use CoffeeScript, how it is compiled, and introduced some of the tools available. He also provided an overview of the basic function syntax and examples of some of CoffeeScript’s key features.

Mithila Wanasinghe from Keele University described his experience of mock interviews with employers in the IT industry. Part of his degree course includes a contribution from commercial IT companies, part of which involves taking students through their own interview processes to help them gain experience. Wanasinghe described the types of assessment he encountered in this process, including making a presentation, group work, the interview, and reviewing your CV. He also shared some of the tips he has learnt about how to succeed in these assessments.

Zeeshan Ahmed from Sheffield Hallam University tackled the subject of design and the value of design to the IT industry in his lightning talk. He provided some quick tips that don’t take long, but improve the overall design of the website, included colour, contrast, navigation, typography, use of space. He argued for simplicity and consistency, and emphasised the need for testing.

Zeeshan spoke to us about his experiences of DevXS and explained why he found the event so useful as an introduction to programming…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Chris Atkin-Granville from Keele University gave a demonstration of his web application: Tundra, which he described as an open source alternative to iGoogle. Tundra features a range of different widget types, each of which can auto-refresh independently of the others; allows you to add your own choice of search engine; and allows you to customise the site by applying your own CSS. He gave an overview of how it works and asked for assistance from the other developers at the event to help examine the application for security issues.

Malte Ressin from the University of West London discussed software localisation and internationalisation, emphasising the difference between making software work in a local context, perhaps within a different language or culture, by the use of translation and the process of internationalising the software so that it can be localised. He gave examples of some of the difficulties that can arise which require more than just textual translation, including the different cultural meanings of colours and the different formatting conventions for tables. He identified the mismatch between development methods like Agile and localisation requirements and stressed the importance of thinking about localisation during development, rather than assuming it will be a simple case of translation.

Challenges

Throughout the event students were encourage to work in teams to compete for one of the wide range of challenges offered by the event sponsors. There were 26 entries in total, with each team given just one minute to pitch their solution to the judges.

All of the judges were impressed by the high standard of all of the entries, many of which had been created during all-night coding sessions. Here is a summary of the prizes on offer and the projects which impressed the judges…

The Scholarly Publishing Challenge, set by Public Platforms, offered a £100 prize for innovative work relating to scholarly publishing. This was won by the Tasks for Chrome project, which is a Google Chrome extension which allows you to create “to do” lists, including reading lists which are generated by the application once the user has requested the reading material from a certain course. This was developed by Andrew Fairbarin, Jonathan Frost and Andrei Simionescu from the University of York, and Craig Roberts from Aberystwyth University.

The Most Sustainable Web Application Challenge, set by the DevXS team, offered $200 of AWS Credit for the team which built the most sustainable and useful web application. This was won by the Unofficial University Guide project, created by Sam Elliott and Elliot Davies from the University of St Andrews, and Andrei Mustata from the University of Glasgow. The project combines a variety of data to provide an alternative university league table, which draws upon career prospects, teaching scores, student:staff ratios, local benefit sanctions data, life expectancy and social deprivation data to help provide a more complete picture of the university and surrounding area.

The Challenging Gender Stereotypes Challenge, set by the University of Lincoln School of Computing, offered £200 of vouchers for work which challenges gender stereotypes in computing or gaming. This was won by Julie Allinson from the University of York, who carried out a data project to investigate gender distribution in computer science across GCSE, A Level and Higher Education. Her work can be found on Google Docs.

Julie Allinson gave us her insights into the event as both a student and someone with a background working in HE in this short video interview…

Click here to view the embedded video.

The DevCSI Competition offered an overall prize to the best ideas that make a difference to University life for students and/or staff. There was a first prize of £250 of Amazon vouchers on offer, with a second prize of £150 of vouchers and a third prize of £100 of vouchers. The winning team was Unofficial University Guide, with Tasks for Chrome coming in second place. The third place prize went to the Roominate project, which is a Twitter-based service that helps gets people to the rooms they need to find on Lincoln campus developed by Team Awesome, consisting of Sam Jordan and Jon Begin from the University of Hull, Craig Sansam from the Open University and Andy Garbett from the University of Lincoln.

There were also honourable mentions: for the Price Splitter, Intr, and Find It projects.

The data.lincoln.ac.uk Challenge, set by LNCD at the University of Lincoln, offered over £250 in vouchers for the best use of data.lincoln.ac.uk. First place was awarded to the Roominator project, with a £50 second prize going to the MUCAS project, which provides an Android app for searching UCAS course information for the University of Lincoln, developed by Adam Hay and Justin Leung from Anglia Ruskin University, 
Joshua Moon from the University of Hull, 
Richard Hall from the University of East Anglia and Nick Simm from the University of Leeds.

The Inclusion and Accessibility Challenge, also set by LNCD at the University of Lincoln, offered a £100 ‘bonus’ voucher for the work that best demonstrates attention to accessibility and inclusivity. This was won by the Cyber People team for their MindBodySoul Robot, which combines a roomba vacuum robot with a Microsoft Kinect so it can be controlled with hand gestures, android and/or mind control. The team consisted of John Dyer, Samuel Clements, Thomas Lowe, Helen Harman, Bill Richardson, Claire Sauze, Colin Sauze, and Tarirai Mangwiro from Aberystwyth University, Babalola Adesanya-Shine from the University of Oxford, John C. Murray from the University of Lincoln and James Lendrem from the University of Newcastle.

The Social Apps and APIs Challenge, set by the Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre (LiSC), awarded a prize of £200 worth of vouchers to the best project addressing any of the following four themes:

• Applications that annotate the physical world, digitally, in ways that expand our encounters with the world (i.e., serendipity), rather than limiting them
• Apps that support social interaction at hack weekends
• Apps that use university data in subversive or cheeky ways
• Mashing open government data sets (data.gov.uk) with university data

The winner was the Social Library App, which allows students to recommend and rate books that are relevant to their degree course. A live demo is available here. The project was devised by Jenny Wong and Andrew Slack from the University of Salford, Jimmy Thompson and Alan Farquharson, Tom Fallon and Asad Haider from Manchester Metropolitan University, and Alexandru Grigoroi from the University of Manchester.

The Smart Research Frameworks Challenge, set by the University of Southampton, offered £300 worth of vouchers for the team which designed and built an application that used the University of Southampton’s “health and safety dataset” to provide a service to university students and/or staff.

First place went to the COSHH Assessment Form Generator, which enables the user to generate a COSHH assessment form using a web application which relies on an RDF dataset. This was created by Kristopher Early and Enrico Teterra from the University of Stirling.

Second place went to the Globally Harmonised System project, which provides information about chemical properties and hazards. The team consisted of Johnathan Dingley, Kevin Hargan and Perry Johnson from the University of Ulster Coleraine, Kim Ward from Sheffield Hallam University and James Price.

The Library Activity Challenge, set by the University of Lincoln Library, offered £250 of Amazon vouchers to the team making the best use of library activity data as part of the application they developed over the weekend. This was won by the OokNog project, which provides an interface for searching for articles and discovering related papers. A live demo is available here. The OokNog team consisted of Andrew Collins, Thomas Gorry, Jude-Thaddeus Ojiaku and Arnoud Pastink from the University of Liverpool.

Andrew and Arnoud from the OokNog project spoke to us about their experience at DevXS and described some of the technologies used within their project…

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Guardian Challenge offered £100 in amazon vouchers for best hack around “Social Inclusion in FE or HE”. This was also won by the Unofficial University Guide project.

The Cottage Labs Challenge offered a job interview for the developer who could develop solutions to any of the existing issues affecting their open source projects. This was won by Emanuil Tolev from Aberystwyth University, who successfully resolved a bug on their Bibserver project.

Emanuil spoke to us about how valuable he had found the event, and gave his perspective as a student working within HE whilst studying…

Click here to view the embedded video.

A complete list of all the teams that took part, together with details of their projects, can be found at the DevXS wiki.

Conclusions

DevXS clearly demonstrated that students can be an extremely valuable resource for universities looking to innovate and make use of new skills and technologies, whilst giving their students the opportunity to gain practical experience in the work place. We were thrilled to see so many useful projects created in such a short space of time during the event and we look forward to seeing how these develop in the coming weeks and months.

We hope to see some of these students again at Dev8D in February, where they will have another opportunity to share, inspire and be inspired by other developers working in HE.

Student developers demonstrate how deep integration with the rest of the university is one of the real benefits of a local developer.

In this DevCSI case study, Michelle Pauli interviews Joss Winn and Alex Bilbie to find out more about the impact student developers are having at the University of Lincoln…

The problem space

In 2009 the University of Lincoln simply did not have staff with the necessary skills and remit to develop projects around technological innovation for research, teaching and learning.

Lincoln’s Centre for Educational Research and Development (CERD) was keen to explore these areas and, using the knowledge and expertise of technology officer Joss Winn, succeeded in implementing various open source web applications such as WordPress blogs, Mahara e-Portfolios and Mediawiki. However, without dedicated programming skills, CERD soon reached its technological limits.

Fortunately, by that stage Joss had made a successful bid for a Rapid Innovation JISCPress project which enabled CERD to employ an undergraduate student, Alex Bilbie, as a freelance developer. Alex went on to take a year out from his studies to work full-time as a student developer within the ICT department, and is now returning to his degree on a part-time basis while continuing to work.

Alex’s employment by CERD and the ICT team took place within the context of the university’s Student as Producer project, which emphasises the role of the student in shaping the teaching and learning experience. Working as a “critical friend” within the department, Alex could bring a fresh approach to its thinking and, says Joss, “demonstrated to us that students can have the requisite skills, enthusiasm and experience to enable us to innovate rapidly.” Lincoln has gone on to employ more students in these kinds of roles.

Over the last two years at Lincoln, CERD, the ICT department and the library have worked collaboratively on four JISC-funded projects (JISCPress, Total ReCal, Linking You and Jerome) as well as other projects such as a virtual research environment and blogs.

The largest and most complex of the JISC projects was Total ReCal. It is a calendar system, rebranded as My Calendar when it launches at Lincoln later this year, which integrates information from multiple sources and makes the information accessible to any application that supports the standard iCalendar format.

It was a real project with huge amounts of data and showed other staff what could be done with very modern tools built on a different kind of database,” comments Joss, “and it provided excellent work experience for Alex and his co-developer, Nick Jackson.”

In addition, Alex worked on knowledge transfer partnerships, including discussions with the local council about how the university and the council might work together on open data schemes. This ongoing project to expose institutional data, data.ac.uk, involved working alongside high profile universities, including Cambridge, Oxford, Southampton and the Open University.

It all adds up to a successful experiment in student developers, both in terms of experience for the student developers themselves and outcomes for the institution as a whole.

“We’ve put Lincoln firmly on the map in terms of the JISC community,” says Alex. “We’re working alongside esteemed establishments and we’re in a good position as a young university – more established places have lots of old practices and policies whereas the culture at Lincoln remains focused on innovation. The work has been well-received by senior management and we’ve been nominated for staff awards. And I get to play with lots of new technology and interesting things!”

Tangible business benefits

As a result of its innovative ways of working, Lincoln has been remarkably successful at bidding for and attracting external funding for its projects. The projects themselves also have business benefits. Total ReCal is more than just a calendar service – it is a datastore using new database technology, MongoDB, with great potential for future developments.

Other savings include switching to an open source e-portfolio tool from a proprietary product, which has saved several thousand pounds a year in licensing.

There is also strong anecdotal evidence of tangible business benefits:

“The web manager has said that our setting up of the university blogs saves his team considerable time as staff can now set up their own managed websites. It also saves the university money that would otherwise be spent developing disparate websites for projects etc,” says Joss.

Why use a local developer?

For Joss, there is no question that Lincoln has made the right choice in filling its skills gap with student developers who have the skills, the enthusiasm and the local knowledge to say “we can do this”, and then get on and do it.

“Had we been asked to outsource the implementation of our ideas, we would have been much restrained by university processes for mandating projects and tendering, for example. The combination of quickly showing evidence of our work, as well as attracting external funding based on our ideas and experiments, has allowed us to build confidence in our work, among ourselves and our colleagues,” he says.

Alex points to the benefits of student developers having a good relationship with staff across the university:

“It’s not design-by-committee as it would be if the work was outsourced. I can make decisions and get on with it because I understand how it all works and can dip into and influence different parts of the university rather than just one department,” he says. “For example, during clearing I was able to look after the university social marketing campaign, managing our communications over Twitter and replying to tweets. Deep integration with the rest of the university is a real benefit of a local developer.”

“It’s also about putting money where our mouth is,” concludes Joss. “Student as Producer is not just about involving students at the committee level but about having them working alongside you, grounding your work and driving the experience.”

Local developers adapt a Moodle Module to create an integrated personal development planning solution relevant to staff, students and managers.

In this DevCSI case study, Jane Plenderlith investigates a local developer success story from MidKent College, exploring how an enthusiasm for open source solutions helped local developers to create a personal development planning tool that better met the needs of students, staff and managers at the college…

The problem space

With two extensive campuses, MidKent College is one of the largest further education and training providers in the south-east of England. Managers had identified an ongoing problem with the College’s proprietary Personal Development Planning (PLP) system, which was largely unused by staff, ignored by students, and no longer meeting management needs. The College wanted a solution which enabled information to be easily shared, and integrated with their Moodle VLE.

What the developer did

e-Learning Manager Rosie Douglas is an enthusiastic advocate of open source systems and an active participant in the Moodle development community. She was familiar with the open source PLP modules (Moodle plug-in) created by the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC). These modules allow tutors, personal tutors and students to set targets, undertake progress reviews, conduct course reviews and highlight concerns.

Dan Attwood, recently appointed VLE developer and systems administrator, was tasked with customising the ULCC base modules to meet College needs. Initial requirements were identified through discussion with academic managers and IT staff. A core development team of three took responsibility for overseeing and implementing the changes. Early development and testing were undertaken using a development server. New features were pushed live with a small team of keen testers, and priority given to fixing any identified bugs. Says Dan:

“In effect we were operating a kind of loose SCRUM methodology. We held regular meetings to discuss new features, then implementing these for testing was a kind of sprint. Pushing straight to live in very small increments has proved to be the best way to rapidly create new features and respond to requests from staff. It did also mean that bugs were exposed to end users, but these were always small and rapidly fixed. We have now taken to labelling some features as beta with the aim of encouraging feedback, and this is proving very effective.”

Group Target Screenshot

Tangible business benefits

Development and implementation costs for the bespoke Moodle PLP module are no more, and probably less, than the costs of the previous proprietary system. However, the principal benefit for the College is having a flexible, tailor-made system that is widely used and appreciated by students and staff, and meets management needs. Information that previously had to be gathered from various sources is now available in one place for students, staff, parents, personal tutors and academic tutors to review. The inclusion of a group update function has saved a lot of staff time accessing individual student accounts:

“They love it that we listened to what they said, went away and came up with a solution, and it worked!”

There is evidence from students that the new system is having a positive impact on their learning experience. Game-oriented facilities with feedback and badges for work in class are well received by some groups:

“Some staff were initially quite sceptical, but then the students were asking for the printing facility to be enabled so they could print off their badges and take them home to show their mums!”

Playing an active role in the open source development community has raised the profile of the College nationally and particularly in the South-East region:

“We go to conferences and talk about what we have done,” says Dan. “People are interested in our code and we are exploring ways of sharing it with other institutions.”

Why use a local developer?

The core team understood the business processes of the institution from both a technical and an academic viewpoint. They were able to disseminate information quickly, and support each other with responding to queries from various quarters.

“I was relatively new to the College and to the academic environment,” says Dan. “but I was in the right place to ask questions and respond quickly when problems or queries arose.”

Working within an open source development support community also has advantages, and the team is currently exploring possibilities for sharing the code for the customisation of the original ULCC module with other FE providers in the area.

The problem space

The South-West Wales HE Partnership (SWWHEP) is a collaborative shared services initiative between the University of Swansea, Swansea Metropolitan University and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Aware for some time of the potential opportunities for shared resource discovery, SWWHEP had been looking for a next generation solution to provide integrated search functionality across the three institutions, and also to make general improvements to the library user experience.

What the developer did

A review of options confirmed that all of the proprietary systems that were currently available failed to match SWWHEP’s requirements in key areas, or were simply too expensive. An exploration of open source alternatives then settled on VuFind as the most mature, flexible and stable choice.

Swansea University Head of Collections Mark Hughes says:

“We accepted we’d have to put in quite a bit of development work, but we had staff resource available through the project, and felt it would be a better investment of our time to utilise this, rather than rely on a third party proprietary product that didn’t quite do what we wanted.”

Developer Luke O’Sullivan describes the approach as perpetual rolling beta:

“No official or recognised developmental strategies were used – the process was driven by the perceived functional needs of the project, which were revisited and revised on a regular basis.”

Obtaining and acting on feedback from users was key:

“We’ve had a Feedback button live on the resource discovery interface right from day one, and we’ve had regular comments back and suggestions for improvement. We felt this kind of perpetual feedback seeking was more in line with our incremental development strategy than doing a one-off survey at any given point.”

The system is unique in that it is the first implementation of VuFind in a multi-institution context, and is also the first to be integrated with the Talis Library Management System. All of the changes to the system have been documented and the code has been made available for the VuFind community. Many of the local changes implemented by the team have since been adopted by the core product and are now supported as standard.

Tangible business benefits

With less financial investment than an proprietary system would have required, SWWHEP has developed a solution that matches its very specific requirements. Furthermore, new and improved skill sets amongst key staff will enable more in-house work in the future. As Mark puts it:

“We now have a working product and a relatively experienced and skilled in-house developer. I see this as an investment. With a proprietary product we’d still have a legacy of upgrade and maintenance costs ongoing for however long we kept the product, and with no additional internal resource to show at the end of the process. It’s like doing a car maintenance course and equipping yourself with a decent set of tools rather than paying out a continual stream of funds to a garage. Costs are similar in the short term, but there’s a potential for real financial savings over a longer period.

As a business benefit we’ve gone from three university libraries using fairly unattractive “out of the box” resource discovery solutions to the provision of a joint solution that is modern, flexible, and, judging from feedback, far more user friendly than any of the previous alternatives.”

Why use a local developer?

Keeping the development local had several significant advantages for SWWHEP. Capital costs were minimised, and salary costs were already included within the project. Local knowledge of library procedures, and the ability to liaise quickly and closely with stakeholders at each institution, helped to maximise the effectiveness of the development.

The team also had flexibility to develop to its own priorities and project timescale rather than one imposed by an external agency. Utilising an open source product and keeping development in-house allowed a far greater measure of control over the project and the end product.

From a management perspective, the enhancement of staff skills has added value to work being undertaken in other areas of the University of Swansea library, which will be of great benefit to the future development of the service.

Presentations

The event began with a series of short presentations to introduce some of the concepts, techniques and problem spaces of open data.

When Not to Link your Linked Data: Open Data at the University of Southampton

Christopher Gutteridge

Gutteridge kicked off the event with a crash course in the differences and overlaps between open data, RDF and linked data before giving us a whirlwind tour of some of the ways in which they are using open linked data at the University of Southampton.

His main case study focused on their work for the university catering department. Gutteridge and his team were keen that there should be no additional workload for those maintaining the source data by opening it up, so they took existing Excel spreadsheets used to record menus, product prices and stock information, tidied these up and made them available as Google spreadsheets. They created a script to take this data and use it to drive the catering department website at http://catering.southampton.ac.uk, making it the first RDF-powered catering site.

“All this transparency stuff is all very well and go, but all people want to know is where to get coffee”

The team added further value by creating a spreadsheet by hand to link data from a disabled access review to the coffee shop locations, so you can now see access information when you’re searching the catering site for a cafe on campus. The is a good example of when to link data, as it adds real value for relatively low investment by connecting data that is already available.

Gutteridge emphasised that you should not link data unless there is a return on the effort invested to create it. If you build a useful tool on top of the linked, open data, people can see the value. In this case, the catering department see the real benefit of a fully and automatically up-to-date website, which can help to drive sales and also reduce some of their administrative workload by enabling them to generate and print out menus in only a few clicks.

“You have to trick people into doing the right thing”

Gutteridge moved on to discuss the wider open data activity at the University of Southampton, including the types of data that they make available (explicitly formal information put out by the university or approved by the university) and the risks to the university’s reputation which had to be considered when judging how best to use the data and what services to offer website visitors.

Finally, Gutteridge cited wiki.openorg.ecs.soton.ac.uk which is run by himself and Dave Challis, and provides some recommended patterns to help people get going. He noted the importance to use common patterns to link data so that it can be connected with other data sets in the future.

Gutteridge concluded by emphasising that your should not link data unless you can find a return on investment to justify the effort of doing so.

Defining the Problem Space Around Getting Institutional Estates Systems Talking to Other Campus IT

Rob Bristow, Greening ICT Manager

Bristow outlined the essential need for universities to save energy, money and carbon, and highlighted the potential for using data from the building management systems used by Estates departments to help realise these savings. He observed that Estates managers don’t have the expertise to expose this data and make use of it in other systems, whilst university developers often don’t know this data exists or how to talk effectively to Estates managers.

However, estates people are beginning to look for help with their IT to help join up their systems and make use of the data to drive energy and carbon savings. To illustrate, Bristow described a problem at Leeds University’s data centre where smart doors that couldn’t be used because they didn’t connect to the building management system, and highlighted comments from the Chair of AUDE, who observed that there is a deluge of data coming out of the number of new meters being installed, but people don’t know what to do with that data.

Bristow went on to describe some current projects within this space, including the PAWS project (an open source PC power-down solution developed at the University of Aberystwyth), Kit-Catalogue (a swap shop for laboratory equipment developed at Loughborough University), the Heat & Light by Timetable project at Leeds Metropolitan and the CUSTOMER project at the University of Coventry, which is investigating how to reduce energy consumption at halls of residence by examining behaviour and feedback loops to help encourage change.

Bristow is looking to bring in the skills of local developers and open data domain experts to help university Estates managers to make fuller use of the data that’s available. He discussed plans for two future events with DevCSI – suggesting one “interfaces day” to facilitate talks between developers and estates people, followed by a hack day to produce some real solutions.

SALAMI Demo

Tom Kirkham, University of Nottingham

Kirkam provided us with an introduction to the SALAMI project created by the CIEPD group. The aim of the project is to integrate data into a employability ecosystem to help fill the gaps created by recent cuts to careers advice services.

Kirkham outlined some of the data sources that are used in SALAMI and provided a practical demonstration of the interface by searching for a particular occupation against a specific location. The system returned job descriptions, iCould videos interviews about what you can achieve through training for that occupation, a map of local colleges providing relevant training, lists of course titles, job trends in the local area (such as vacancies and “job claimants” who are trained to do a job but are claiming benefits), and crime statistics.

Kirkham noted that this has helped to open people’s minds to open data, whilst also showing that where funding has been lost there are options to fill the gaps for students.

“The more open data there is, the more innovation there is”

Looking forward to the future of this project, Kirkham observed that they have a lot of student data in ePortfolios, which they want to use to help students create resumes for employers to search to find placement students. By collecting data about how the employers are searching they hope to recycle this information so students can see how employers search and consider their CVs.

Metrics for the Social Web

Brian Kelly, UKOLN, University of Bath

Kelly looked at how open data can be used to collect data about the university from outside of the institution, including the use of social web tools to support institutional activities. He presented some of the ways you can currently visualise social web data, including tools Peerindex, which help you to make comparisons between the topic fingerprint of different institutional Twitter accounts.

Kelly described his efforts to carry out a manual proof-of-concept to collect data about use of Slideshare in order to prove the value of uploading resources, noting this identifies a need for a more efficient, streamlined way of doing such analysis. He asked if there are APIs available to help get this data and therefore enable better understanding and strategy development.

Kelly emphasised that he would like to avoid university marketing departments paying social media companies for social media analytics. He feels there is a role for local developers to add value to their institution by gathering, interpreting and visualising data for personal and institutional use of social web.

Debates

There were several key debates which continued throughout the event, including a discussion about the value of opening up scientific data and rewarding people for producing good, open data upon which research can be based, rather than only rewarding people for producing a paper.

The group also discussed the importance of lobbying within the institution to open up more data, and the need to attach the idea of open data to things people already understand, such as RSS feeds, to help change the hearts and minds of decision makers. Chris Gutteridge argued for collecting quotes from happy managers and shared some of the comments he has already collected towards this aim.

Outcomes

KIS Data Sources

One of the main practical activities of the day was to consider the requirements of the new Key Information Sets (KIS) that the government are requiring universities to provide.

The group examined the the requirements in detail and brainstormed potential data sources that could be used to satisfy the requirements. They identified a number of issues and gaps in the data that is currently openly available and discussed mechanisms for encouraging specific organisations to release the necessary data.

“KIS Me”

Following on from this, one group worked on an interface design which could take KIS data and data from other sources to create a profile of each institution, enabling prospective students to compare universities and select their own weighting for different aspects of university life that interest them to create a more personalised search experience.

They identified eight priority areas which prospective students could rank on sliders to indicate their relative importance to them. These included: gender rations, accommodation costs, sports facilities, local cultural context, social life, community engagement opportunities, environment and transport. The group identified potential data sources to score universities against these priorities and explored the types of algorithms that might be needed to calculate a single value from

Accommodation Cost Heat Map

The main code produced by the hack day was written by Ben O’Steen  (Cottage Labs) and Dave Challis (University of Southampton) who created an accommodation cost heat map using data from Zoopla.  They queried Data.gov.uk to get a list of latitude and longitudes for the UK HE institutions, which they passed to the Zoopla search API to find properties within a 15 miles radius of each featuring the keywordsstudent and rental only. They calculated the price per person by dividing the rental cost by the number of bedrooms in the property, then converted this data to KML and fed it to Google Maps.  Ben describes the project in more detail in his blog post about the project, including links to the code.

Conclusions

Open, linked data proved to be a key theme during the main IWMW workshop, particularly as web managers focused on how to add value to their services.  Mike Nolan from Edge Hill University provided a report to the workshop about the activities of the hack day group, observing that: “Web teams may be able to provide assistance integrating information from estates to make campuses more efficient.”  This emphasis on data integration highlighted the value of developers for web managers and the strategic innovation that local developers are able to contribute.