Community Led Activities

A centre of expertise in digital information management

www.ukoln.ac.uk

Community-Led Activities

Brian Kelly UKOLNUniversity of BathBathBA2 7AY

[email protected]

UKOLN is supported by:

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/online/emerge-2007-06/http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/online/emerge-2007-06/

About This TalkQuestions to be addressed:

• What useful work can be done without significant project funding?

• What are the benefits of community-led activities?

• How can community activities help to enhance project proposals?

• How can community-led activities help to embed project-funded deliverables?

About This TalkQuestions to be addressed:

• What useful work can be done without significant project funding?

• What are the benefits of community-led activities?

• How can community activities help to enhance project proposals?

• How can community-led activities help to embed project-funded deliverables?

This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (but note caveat)

Resources bookmarked using ‘jisc-emerge-2007-06-07' tag


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About The Speaker

Brian Kelly:• UK Web Focus – an advisory post which provides

advices on making effective use of the on Web (with focus on standards, emerging Web technologies)

• Involved in Web work since January 1993• Providing support on Web 2.0 / social networks to

Emerge projectAbout UKOLN:

• National centre of expertise in digital information management

• Based at the University of Bath• Funded by MLA and JISC to support the cultural

heritage and higher/further education sectors

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About This Talk

View of history of development work (over-simplified):

• Project proposals developed by individuals, institutions or groups in competition with others

• Successful bids develop deliverables, with community engagement limited to formal tasks

Vision for exploiting Communities of Practices:

• Benefits of openness being appreciated (open source, open standards, open data, …)

• Benefits of social networks being appreciated (wisdom of crowds)

• Social networking technologies are pervasive

• We (individuals, groups, institutions) can be enriched by community engagement

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Note current debate on approaches for institutional repositories Note current debate on approaches for institutional repositories


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IR Debate

Will formal projects be slow to respond to changes to the environment (technical, cultural)?

Can projects do “quick and dirty” – even if that’s what users want?

Are we repeating Coloured Books?

Will formal projects be slow to respond to changes to the environment (technical, cultural)?

Can projects do “quick and dirty” – even if that’s what users want?

Are we repeating Coloured Books?

http://www.slideshare.net/eduservfoundation/http://www.slideshare.net/eduservfoundation/http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/


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Aims of Session

This talk (and follow-up discussion) aims to:• Provide a better understanding of benefits of

community-led activities• Give examples of community-led activities• Invite suggestions and discussion on

community-led activities for Emerge community

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“If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”

Within the context of U&I / Emerge’s remit for rapid development, testing, learning, iteration, etc. which may lead to new best practices for development work

Within the context of U&I / Emerge’s remit for rapid development, testing, learning, iteration, etc. which may lead to new best practices for development work


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Why Community?

Successful deliverables require range of expertise:

• Visionary, innovative thinking• User-focussed thinking• Development expertise• Dissemination expertise• User engagement• …

Using a community can enable better products to be delivered

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Why Community-Led?Its what we expect these days:

• We encourage students to take responsibility for aspects of their own learning

• Why should we expect all ideas & initiatives in projects to develop within projects teams, advisory groups and input from funders?

It provides diversity:• Staff development• Exploitation of new ideas, technologies, …• Avoids the “We tried that in the C20th and it didn’t

work” mentality• Challenges orthodoxies which may no longer be

valid• …

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Why Now?

Why is it appropriate to take this approach now?• Technical infrastructure in place: RSS,

‘cool URIs’, clean(-ish) HTML and CSS• Web 2.0 focus on user-generated content• Diverse set of application environments

available• Easy to use (users won’t want training or

read manuals)

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This covers the technical reasons why it is timely to exploit social networking software. Non-technical reasons are out-of-scope for this talk.

This covers the technical reasons why it is timely to exploit social networking software. Non-technical reasons are out-of-scope for this talk.


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Why Not?

What if Google, … goes out of business?

What about copyright, data protection, …?

But I’m a developer – I’ll be out of a job

I’m a manager – what about use in mission-critical areas?

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Why Not? Really?

What if Google, … goes out of business?

What about copyright, data protection, …?

But I’m a developer – I’ll be out of a job

I’m a manager – what about use in mission-critical areas?

Can you guarantee ongoing provision of your deliverables, your institutions’ or the government’s? And what if Google thrives?

Risk assessment & management; we’ve been here in 1990s - and the world may change (cf. YouTube & Warner music)

World doesn’t owe you a job writing software which isn’t needed! You’ll have a job doing the integration, support, …

Risk assessment & management; provision of alternatives; migration plans; user engagement; sharing experiences, …

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“Risk Assessment For Use Of Third Party Web 2.0 Services”, QA Focus“Risk Assessment For Use Of Third Party Web 2.0 Services”, QA Focus


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Why Not? (2)

We need to do server-side proper development

Our SysAdmins say:• Too busy• It’s complicated; we’d need to upgrade Perl

libraries, install new version of database, wait until a full moon; …

• Sorry, can’t open that port – “There be dragons”

• Add you own story here


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Why Not? Really? (2)

It’s not just about del.icio.us, Flickr, Facebook, …You can also use third party ISPs, which can provide 2-click interfaces to applications e.g. Site5’s Fantastico/Cpanel provides:

• Moodle• Wordpress• Drupla• PHP …• …

Or use Amazon S3 / EC2 to rent storage, CPU cycles, APIs, …

For ~ $6/month!For ~ $6/month!


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The IWMW Community (1)

Institutional Web management profession:• Newish profession (circa 1994-5)• Initial enthusiasm, then awareness of role as

pawn in institutional power struggles Establishment of:

• web-support then website-info-mgt mailing lists set up in mid-1990s

• Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) established in 1997

• Held annually since then• 150+ delegates attend• Now several generations of participants

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The IWMW Community (2)

Strengths of the community:• Shared goals and interests• Shared challenges (lack of resources,

unreasonable expectations, difficult users , …)• Annual F2F helps community building

Weaknesses:• Focus on helping with specific (often technical)

problems and sharing solutions• Limited opportunities for strategic thinking• Limited exploitation strengths of community and

social network technology (still many primarily using JISCMail lists – but some isolated uses of blogs, wikis, …)

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IWMW 2007

IWMW 2007:• University of York on 16-18 July (now fully

subscribed)• Building on technical innovations from previous

years (WiFi network, real-time chat, wikis, folksonomies, …)

This year:• Innovation Competition encouraging submissions

which are: User-focussed Light-weight ‘Cool’ – user response of “Wow”, “I wish I’d

thought of that!”, “We must do that”, …

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Supporting The Competition (1)

To encourage community-led development work:

• Provide data for techies to exploit

• Provide open access (CC) to avoid legal problems

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http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/iwmw/rss-feeds

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/iwmw/rss-feeds


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Supporting The Competition (2)

To encourage community-led development work:

• Provide data for techies to exploit

• Provide open access (CC) to avoid legal problems

• Provide service which interests users (& funders – is the UK community involved?)

• Provide open service which others can build on (e.g. timelines, clouds, …)

http://www.acme.com/GeoRSS/?xmlsrc=...http://www.acme.com/GeoRSS/?xmlsrc=...

Note icon may represent multiple speakers from an institution or region

Note icon may represent multiple speakers from an institution or region


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Managing The Risks

What if nobody enters the competition?

Avoiding The Problem

• We can incentivize the competition (a prize – depending on budget and sponsorship, kudos, …)

• We can highlight personal benefits (add to CV)

• We can highlight organisational benefits (University of X won an award for Y)

• We can encourage our friends to enter

• We can provide examples of developments ourselves

Learning For Next Year

• We can gain feedback and encourage competitors & non-competitors to share their experiences

• We can encourage them to join in next year (its new for them and they weren’t sure of what to do)

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Ideas For Competition

Some ideas (but should I be explicit?):

• Location map of all 11 IWMWs. Done – but can it be enhanced (e.g. cloud maps from abstracts of speakers’ talks)

• Map of location of all plenary speakers (done)

• Delegate maps. Are we attracting participants from across the country? Which institutions have never attended? What’s the carbon cost of delegates travelling?(Note data protection, privacy, etc. issues)

• Timeline. V0.1 done – but potential for richer timelines

• RSS feeds – many provided for use by others

• YouTube video, Second Life, …

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About The LearningThe competition may be fun and useful applications developedMore importantly it’s an opportunity to:

• Try something new• Gain feedback from friendly audience• Gain understanding of potential of

lightweight Web 2.0 technologies• Understand how your data can be reused

by others (to everyone’s benefit)• Break down the ‘we must do everything

ourselves’ attitude

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Application To Emerge

Emerge Community Generated Activity Policy RFC

For a community to be successful:

• Members have common interests

• Feeling of openness

• Members need to develop

• Links with others

• Energy and enthusiasm

This relates closely with the approaches taken with the IWMW community

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See Community generated activity policy, <http://jiscemerge.org.uk/vle/mod/resource/view.php?id=14>


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GroupingsS

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TopicAreas

PLEsVirtual environmentsMobile technologiesUsability…

PersonalAreas

Technical expertiseUser engagementAdvocacyWriting, scripting, broadcasting ,…

Speaking, performing, role-playing, …

Research…

What Else?

……

How should effective groups emerge?• Common interests in topics or diversity of interests?• Common personal interests (fellow techies) or diversity of

interests?

And what other groups may there be?

How should effective groups emerge?• Common interests in topics or diversity of interests?• Common personal interests (fellow techies) or diversity of

interests?

And what other groups may there be?


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Questions For Discussion

Some issues:• Are you happy with the rationale for

community-led activities?• What areas do you think would be

appropriate as community-led activities?• How will you progress this?• What other issues would you like to

discuss today?

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My Thoughts

Simple individual activities:• Sharing info on good venues for events:

e.g. with WiFi) – del.icio.us tag of recommended-venues (recommended-hotels, …)

• …

Group activity: risk assessment for Web 2.0 services• Contribute to wiki (Wikipedia?) on governance of

service (ownership, bank balance, …)• Whois++ to establish dates, ownership, ..• Document experiences (use cases, successes,

failures, management approaches, …)• Make this stuff open and widely available

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Questions

Any questions?

Community Led Activities

Technology

Transcript of Community Led Activities