Innovation Support Centre » DevCSI

Sakai-Jasig plenary talk on the changing role of the developer in HE

Paul Walk — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 12:45:49 +0000

I have just given an invited plenary talk at the joint Sakai/Jasig Conference in Atlanta, on The Changing Role of the Developer in HE. Introducing the notion of the connected developer, and describing how the DevCSI project has supported the growth of a community of ‘connected developers’ in HE in the UK, I went on to describe the need for a new role – the Strategic Developer – one which can provide a developer perspective to institutional strategic decision-making.

The talk appears to have generated considerable interest in the Sakai and Jasig communities, with an invitation to DevCSI to collaborate more formally.

Slides for this talk are available on Slideshare.

BiblioHack in the Summertime

Mahendra Mahey — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:59:02 +0000

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Biblio Group, DevCSI and the

Working Group on Open Data in Cultural Heritage, present BiblioHack, an
open Hackathon to kick-start the summer months:

http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/2012/05/10/bibliohack/

From Wednesday 13 – Thursday 14 June 2012, we’ll be meeting at Queen
Mary, University of London, East London, and any budding hackers are
welcome, along with anyone interested in opening up metadata and the
open cause. This free event aims to bring together software developers,
project managers, librarians and experts in the area of Open
Bibliographic Data.

A workshop will run alongside the coding activity on 13 June, and a
meet-up on the evening of 12 June is open to all, whether you’re
attending the Hackathon or not.

What is BiblioHack?
BiblioHack will be two days of hacking and sharing ideas about open
bibliographic metadata. There will be opportunities to hack on open
bibliographic datasets and experiment with new prototypes and tools. The
focus will be on building things and improving existing systems that
enable people and institutions to get the most out of bibliographic data.

If you’re not a coder, there are sessions for you too. We will be
running a hands-on workshop addressing the technical aspects of opening
up cultural heritage data as well as looking at the best-of-breed
open-source tools to achieve that. There will also be an opportunity to
prepare your data for a hackathon and a look at the best standards for
storing and exposing your data to make it more easily reusable.

For further information on speakers, venue, arrangements and free
registration, please visit the DevCSI Web site

Managing Research Data Hack Days – Event Report

Mahendra Mahey — Fri, 11 May 2012 09:53:27 +0000

DevCSI recently ran a ‘Managing Research Data Hack event‘ on 3-4 May 2012 in Manchester.

The event report has now been published on the DevCSI blog, some highlights include:

- Considering the use of SWORD 2 and BitTorrent to deal with large datasets
- Proof-of-concept centralised service for tracking activity data around research projects and individual datasets
- User perspectives on metadata for datasets and examining a common schema to describe metadata for datasets

There are several multimedia interviews with attendees who talked about what they learned, discussed and worked on at the event.

We hope you find the report useful and watch out for similar future follow-up events in this area from DevCSI and JISC.