We are heading into a new chapter in JISC’s history as we embrace the opportunity to change for the future.
It is very pleasing to see that HEFCE’s review of JISC considers us to be a valuable organisation and one that makes an essential contribution. The review makes a number of constructive recommendations designed to help us continue to add value to the education and research sector through the next, difficult, five to ten years.
We are going to be here in the future, but we are going to be different and what is crucial is that we do everything that we can to get this right for those who work for us and the sector.
Some of the recommendations in the review will need much more investigation and consultation before they can be acted upon. We will consult and talk with the sector to ensure we put their needs at the centre of how JISC will deliver in the future.
We are continuing to look at ways of increasing our effectiveness in engaging with colleges and universities to help embed new technologies; clearly this is an important area for us. We are also doing more about providing horizon scanning advice.
I believe JISC has an ongoing and vital role to play. It will be challenging to achieve but I know we have the expertise and knowledge to make JISC a stronger organisation.
The university community often produces useful services out of JISC projects, or out of their own side projects.
The current JISC model means that these wither and die as it’s nobodys job to care about them after then end of a project. The same goes for the development of libraries and tools.
The JISC should look for ways to alter the way it funds things to encourage the curation and basic support of such things past the end of a project. Perhaps a small payment would be enough to keep a service running and supported. ie. £500/year for 10 years after then end of the project or until the service is no longer cost-effective to maintain. It should be enough to keep the lights on AND to encourage people to design systems which will be in it for the long haul, not just the end of the project.
Yay, for what JISC has done over the past 10 years. It was JISC funding that got Open Access to research off the ground, and DevCSI has fostered a community of .ac.uk developers which has significantly improved my ability to do my job, as I now have a peer group of people who care about the same stuff as I do, the line between research and administration.
I agree with the comment above aluohtgh to JISC’s credit I think they understand the importance of developers more than many institutions where they are still seen as IT staff’ or required for maintaining legacy library systems and assisting with online marketing. Developers should be likened to researchers with a distinct community of peers, mature tool sets and productive methodologies. They should be supported in their own right rather than as merely adding value to and supporting institutional processes and practices. Perhaps their productivity is seen as a threat to institutional stability? The weight of the institution is often too great to move in time with the rapid innovations being made in the world of code. There is also the reocurring and tired argument that technology should not drive pedagogy but support and enhance it.
I’d argue that the outcome of the origanil IE documentation wasn’t just the adoption of Open Standards, but about the adoption of common standards across the sector. I’d argue that (low cost) interoperability is not just about open standards, but uniformity.I think the documentation also gave the community something to take to vendors (as opposed to internal developers). When you are talking to a vendor, being able to say the whole UK HE sector is behind this’ is a very strong statement, and perhaps the only way of getting vendors to make the necessary investment in certain areas.I can certainly see some arguments for having a more abstract description of the IE in a Technical foundations’ document. However I do think that the strength of the origanil documentation is in that it gives some specifics.