There is a great William Gibson quote, ‘The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.’
I believe that working with developers to share experiences, ideas and expertise will help distribute those slices of the future that are carved out by innovative developers in individual institutions.
Dev8D is JISC’s annual event for software developers working in higher education. The event is in its third year and kicks off today. It provides opportunities for training, sharing of good practice and creative problem solving for people who work with software for research, teaching and administration in universities and colleges. It is a vibrant and exciting event that produces a flood of ideas and prototypes while providing a unique personal development opportunity for delegates.
I think that we can help developers in universities become even more effective. Dev8D is not a one off event but it is part of a strategic programme of work called the Developer Community in Support of Innovation (devCSI) that has been put in place to support developers and through them, their institutions. The main benefits are:
- to provide training for developers – we calculated that last year’s dev8D delivered £85,000 worth of training to those who attended;
- enable developers to collaborate and share experience in solving problems and addressing issues that many institutions have;
- provide developers with new contacts who can help them with the work they do at their institutions;
- work in partnership with JISC services like OSSWatch and with other relevant initiatives like the mashed libraries events and the Software Sustainability Institute.
Developers working at universities are responsible for a type of local innovation that is crucial to universities in meeting the challenges they face. This can be day to day tweaking of systems to meet demand or it can be looming strategic imperatives such as student satisfaction. There are many ways in which this local innovation benefits institutions but I’d like to highlight three in particular:
- Ensuring that institutional systems work smoothly together saves money by reducing duplication of effort. In many cases this requires the intervention of a local developer to ensure that software that has been bought is integrated with existing systems.
- The needs of students and staff differ between institutions and between departments. Developers in institutions react to these needs and customise software systems or build new ones to ensure those needs are met. This allows the institution to be agile in responding to user needs and to ensure students and staff have a satisfactory experience.
- Developers allow universities to be agile in reacting to and benefiting from the new technology developments that can help them improve services to students and staff. An example of this is Huddersfield University’s work with the information about student and researcher behaviour stored in library systems. In a lot of cases, this information is not used to its full potential. Dave Pattern, the Library Systems Manager at Huddersfield University started analysing Huddersfield’s data because he was interested in it and he made it openly available so that others could see what he had done. Dave’s work attracted the interest of many people in university libraries and was promoted and developed further as part of the Mosaic project. This included the production of some prototype applications built on Huddersfield’s data as part of the Mosaic project. Recently JISC have funded Huddersfield to work with 8 other libraries to investigate the link between library use and student attainment and to experiment with tailoring library provision based on this data
Paul Walk, Deputy Director of UKOLN, elaborates on the value of developers to universities in his fantastic blog post on responsive innovation. I believe that funding projects like devCSI and events like dev8D gives developers the opportunity to come together, share best practice, as well as create and distribute solutions from which the whole of UK education can benefit.
