Transcript http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/online/emerge-2007-06/ Community-Led Activities Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY [email protected] About This Talk Questions to be addressed: • What useful work can be done without significant project funding? •

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/online/emerge-2007-06/
Community-Led Activities
Brian Kelly
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
BA2 7AY
[email protected]
About This Talk
Questions 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?
Note
Recording of talk is permitted. I’ll not listen to Elluminate chat but
work with a colleague during the talk.
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Introduction
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 project
About 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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Introduction
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
Note
current debate on approaches for institutionalwww.ukoln.ac.uk
repositories
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IR Debate
http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/
http://www.slideshare.net/eduservfoundation/
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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?
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Are we repeating Coloured
Books?
Introduction
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
Within the context of
U&I / Emerge’s remit for
rapid development,
testing, learning,
iteration, etc. which may
lead to new best
practices for
“If not us, Athen
If not
now,
thenmanagement
when?” development
work
centrewho?
of expertise
in digital
information
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Understanding
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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Understanding
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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Understanding
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)
This covers the technical reasons why it is timely to exploit
social networking software. Non-technical reasons are outof-scope
for this
talk.
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Understanding
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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Understanding
Why Not? Really?
What if Google, … goes out of business?
Can you guarantee ongoing provision of your deliverables, your
institutions’ or the government’s? And what if Google thrives?
What about copyright, data protection, …?
Risk assessment & management; we’ve been here in 1990s and the world may change (cf. YouTube & Warner music)
But I’m a developer – I’ll be out of a job 
World doesn’t owe you a job writing software which isn’t needed!
You’ll have a job doing the integration, support, …
I’m a manager – what about use in mission-critical
areas?
Risk assessment & management; provision of alternatives;
migration plans; user engagement; sharing experiences, …
“Risk Assessment
For Use
Of information
Third Party
Web 2.0 Services”, www.ukoln.ac.uk
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)
For ~ $6/month!
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, …
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Examples
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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Examples
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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Examples
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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Examples
Supporting The Competition (1)
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/
events/workshops/iwmw/rss-feeds
To encourage
community-led
development work:
• Provide data for
techies to exploit
• Provide open access
(CC) to avoid legal
problems
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Supporting The Competition (2)
http://www.acme.com/GeoRSS/?xmlsrc=...
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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,
Note icon may represent multiple speakers
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clouds, …)
from an Ainstitution
or region
Examples
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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Examples
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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Examples
About The Learning
The competition may be fun and useful
applications developed
More 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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Emerge
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
See Community generated activity policy,
<http://jiscemerge.org.uk/vle/mod/resource/view.php?id=14>
This relates closely with the approaches taken with the
IWMW community
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Suggestions
Groupings
Topic
Areas
PLEs
Virtual environments
Mobile technologies
Usability
…
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Personal
Areas
Technical expertise
User engagement
Advocacy
Writing, 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?
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And
what
other ingroups
may there
be?
Suggestions
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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Suggestions
My Thoughts
Simple individual activities:
• Sharing info on good venues for events:
e.g. with WiFi) – del.icio.us tag of recommendedvenues (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?
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