Thursday 10 May 2007

Raring to go

I’ve had my very short holiday of a week, where I achieved nothing that I wanted. However, my first day back at work has been a raring success. As I had mentioned in an earlier blog, I set up another meeting with OSS-Watch. This time it was all about building communities. Just to make sure that we are getting our moneys worth out of OSS-Watch (not that we pay) I asked some colleagues here at Loughborough if they would like to join the WebPA team for a couple of hours and sit in.

Everyone who attended to find out about Communities has given positive feedback. People have said that they wished they had been able to give more time to attending the afternoon session, to find out more.

As for our project I think that it has been very beneficial on a number of levels. Firstly I have a clearer idea of how we can go about expanding the developing community and the directions that we can take this group. Also as a project it has identified that there are key areas that need to be sorted out now so that progressing the project in the area of communities will be easier. I has also highlighted to the WebPA team some of the routes that the project can take as exit strategies or (a better term) project sustainability from when the funding runs out.

As with licensing, everything can be changed in the future. Yes, you know it there is a BUT. Well here it is, what ever type of structure that we identify know can have an effect in the future if we decide to change it. I will try to keep everyone informed as to what the final decisions are made. I hope that the other members of the WebPA project who where there today found will help inform the decisions that have to be made.

Anyway back to the now. I have lots of work to do, and lots to digest. However as it goes a successful day, just now need to put everything learn into practice.

2 comments:

Nic said...

Some new research has been carried out into the benifits of couumnities, but only in the US. The research feed back positively for online communities but does show a high number of so called 'lurkers'. The research can be found at: http://www.kace.com/pdf/KingResearch_The_Value_of_Online_Communities.pdf

Nic said...

Information that may help with building communities which has been supplied by Ross and Stuart from OSS Watch since yesterday:

* A Pod Cast with Randy Metcalfe
* Create a customised Google search engine