JISC

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Innovation Forum 2008 (JIF08) was held at Keele University on 15 and 16 July 2008. It brought together over 300 people representing more than 100 different organisations within JISC’s portfolio of innovation projects and programmes to share their innovations and experiences with funders, JISC Services, innovation centres and each other.

In her welcoming address, Sarah Porter, Head of Innovation at JISC, described those gathered as not just an innovation community but an innovative community. That innovation and energy was reflected in the level of engagement of delegates across a huge breadth and depth of subjects as well as in the nature of the event itself.

Alongside formal sessions based around five themes, there were also interactive discussion forums, a marketplace with project demonstrations and exhibition stalls, and a range of different formats for debates, including a fast and furious ‘goldfish bowl’ session in which delegates dashed to an inner ring of chairs in order to make their point, and risked being given a red card if they dominated proceedings too much.

The five themes of the Forum were:

• Barriers to the take-up of technologies
• Research data – whose problem is it?
• How to meet the changing student experience
• Sustaining innovation beyond JISC funding
• User-owned technologies vs. institutional infrastructures

Interactive discussion forums were also held on four topics:

• Web 2.0
• JISC Future Priorities
• Green Computing
• e-Framework
  

The theme-based presentations and forums sparked numerous other topics to debate, share experiences and knowledge about and argue over. The lively discussions that buzzed throughout the conference rooms, hallways, café and bar and which were a highlight of the event for the participants were also continued online on the Forum blog. Every session was live-blogged, which enabled the debates to be followed outside the event and for comments to be added after the session itself had finished.

This report draws on those offline and online discussions to present seven key issues which emerged from JIF08. These are:

• Sustainability: business models for innovation
• Sustainability: sharing innovation
• Sustainability: innovation for the environment
• Learner experiences and the digital generation
• Managing multiple identities
• Research data challenges
• Innovative communication

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