The lapse in blog posts has continued

I am aware that the lapse in blogging has continued. There are many reasons behind the lack of posts, mostly related to time.

Since the last post we have held our very first user group meeting for the WebPA tool. I am happy to say that the event was more than successfully. It out stripped my expectations of the day, my only wish was that people would talk and interact with each other. Well they all talked, talked and talked some more (causing us to over run on sessions). This makes such a nice change from me doing all the talking about WebPA, and also from event delegates behaving like the students they say never interact.

One of the best statements about the day came from a delegate who said;

This tool has a great future but it needs to move quickly if it doesn’t want to be overtaken by the big boys’ (e.g. Blackboard et al) growing desire to jump on the ‘assessment and feedback’ bandwagon. Congratulations to all those who’ve worked on it so far and I’d like to express my interest in getting involved.

Really that statement says it all for me. Not only does this person see how they can implement and support the tool at their institution, but they also want to become involved. I think that we can say that we are now at score 2 (score1 being reached a while ago). And that was really what I wanted to get out of the user group, but believe me we got more... one implementer has talked about creating a ''power link for Blackboard, another suggested they help us work with the Moodle community, the list goes on and on.

In addition to the user group, the Physical Sciences Subject Centre held an assessment event last week and again the feedback has been really positive. The day after I was at an e-learning conference at the University of Ulster. This was yet another interesting event and initial feedback was positive and encouraging. I think that we may have collected more potential adopting institutions. I still think more the merrier, but we are coming to the end of the funding and although they will be good for the sustainability of the project, at the moment it looks like with out further funding many of these potential adopters will be out in the cold and not have the support adopters up till now will have had. Only time will tell though

Have we met another important milestone...

...following the demo (thanks to OSS-Watch) at the JISC Conference 2008 (15 April), we have now passed the 200 downloads mark. I know that there are some people who will still remind me that by using the stats provided by the sourceforge area we will not get a real picture. I accept this but at the same time, the stats can help us see that in the days following (untill today) we have had 39 downloads of the system. Yes, I hear you say, but don't forget the project svn. Well I haven't, when I looked at this there has been little activity other than me writing files.

This is not the only knock on effect of demonstrating WebPA at the JISC Conference, I can also track, hightened activity on both the project demonstrator, but also on the project website.

This all bodes well for the project and shows that the way in which we have interacted with the wider HE community to date has been benificial. By word of mouth and attending events such as the JISC conference, prospective users are finding out more about the project, and hopefully will become users. In time from these users we may manage to get more input, from this we may even end up with a health self sustaining community. But I think there may be more milestones to tackle before this is reached.

Back to juggling...

At the moment there are so many different things happening.

Tuesday, the project will be at the JISC Conference 2008. Where I will be demonstrating on the OSS-Watch demonstrator stand. I need to set-up some time to prepare a laptop and ensure that there is enough data in the database to provide a meaning full demonstration.

At the same time there are element of the IMS awards that I need to prepare for. I intend to develop a series of small videos of the software that can be re used else where. There are also the posters which we would like to take.

This is all on top of trying to support all the other institutions who are adopting WebPA and keeping up to date with what stages of use they are at.

In addition to all this I need to find some time to actually sit and do some more coding. This however, may be delayed for a while and I will try and block a time for some intensive coding. Until then I will continue to fix all the problems, but not code any new major feature.

See us at the JISC Conference

Last year while at the JISC conference in Brimingham the folks at OSS-Watch asked if we would be interested in participating in a demo stand. Of course we jumped at the chance. Now a year later this is all becoming reality.

We have our official stint at 10:45 on the OSS-Watch demonstrator stand locationed Hall 3, opposite main JISC stand. However, we will be around all day so feel free to come and find us.

So what happened to March

At the almost beginning of march I wrote about attending the JISC Programme Meeting. Well the outcomes where that it was interesting to see that other JISC e-assessment orientated projects are having some of the same issues that we as a project have been facing. However, in other respects we are miles ahead of others in what we have accomplished. A lot of attendees where interested in how we had progressed to being open source so quickly in the project and where interested in finding out more about what they could learn from us. Also the other main area people where interested in was the IMS Award shortlist. For me the afternoon was not quite as good as it could have been, and I really didn't have much to take away with me.

The following week I was at the OSS-Watch Risk Management in Open Source Procurement. For me the key elements that I picked up on where:

• The more customisations move away from the original code the harder they are to maintain and also integrate back in
• What business reasons can we provide to show that the adoption of WebPA is beneficial
• What are the upgrade cycles for a project, as this will often help to sway a potential adopter
• What would aid our survivability, would it be via becoming a service.
• How can we best show the scalability of the WebPA system.

A lot of other topics where also covered, far too many to mention here.


In the middle of this I have damaged my hand and wrist so, somethings are becoming slightly behind as I work through the pain. I have also had to take some holiday, so that was the end of March really.

Now we are in April, I am getting back into the swing of things. However, I still have a list as long as my arm that I need to complete soon, as well as, preparing for the IMS Awards next month, which is only 5.5weeks away!

Can we ever expect to reach sustainability

Last Thursday we had another meeting with members of the OSS-Watch team, this time the topic for conversation was specifically sustainability. Prior to OSS-Watch coming Ross blogged about the meeting and whether it was viable to build a community to support the project in such a short time.

The meeting proved to raise some interesting opinions from those who attended. One point that came over very clearly is the relationship of project success to project funding. I think that keeping a project ticking over once the funding has finished should not necessarily be a drain on any finances that are around. At the same time the original funding source should not leave the project high and dry. The funders should enable a more sustainable out come to be reached, in the sort term this may require continuation funding. I do accept though that funding can not go on forever and projects have to succeed for themselves if they are to survive.

Another point which was strongly made was that of reputation. This again is a crucial aspect of any project and does not just effect the institution, but also the possibility of gaining more adopters. Here they would like to continue to build on the developing reputation around the WebPA project. Again the but, if there is no clear sustainability plan past the funding, then we could be risking the reputation we are developing.

In all I have learnt that sustainability seems to be a double edged knife. Every action that we take or directions which we go in, can have a dramatic impact on the project, during its life cycle, but also in the long term. Really sustainability needs to have been built in from the beginning, with both success and exit strategies, but hindsight is a wonderful thing...

Update on one little action...

The JISC have to day published a press release on WebPA being short listed for the IMS Global Award. Also with the continuing support from OSS-Watch, who also included the WebPA project in one of their latest blog atricles, there is no pressure...

Further to this Rowin has posted on her blog as well.

Demonstrator Launched

As a project we have assimilated a lot of the information about open source projects and how to be one, from all sources that can be found and in particular those at OSS-Watch. One piece of advice we where given was to make a demonstrator and make it available to potential users to see what the software is about. Well this was realised at the end of October. Within this first week we have had a phenomenal response.

Firstly, Ross from OSS-Watch sent out a very nice comment to the projects JISCmail list, stating that this is a significant step for community development. Secondly, the statistics that are being gathered about the visitors to the site are looking incredible. Already, there are visitors from the UK and the most interesting are the visitors from further afield. It appears that we are getting global interest already. (Not bad for a little JISC funded project with 2 full time staff and another who contributes 1/2 a day a week.)

I hope this has a knock on effect for out fledgling community, by attracting more members. Only time will tell though. But for now I think that all those people who have helped the project get this far, deserve a pat on the back!

WebPA intergration with VLEs

I have in the past twenty four hours been asked about the projects plans to develop integration modules for a particular VLE. I knew that this question would arrive eventually, but I still found my self relatively under prepared to answer it.

What I should be doing is asking the person who sent the query to then develop the solution. That is how open source software works, right. But this is also a project with deliverables which in the perfect world have to be met. I also don't want to scare our potential pilot institutions away from the project. As a result I did reply with a concise statement "that this may be considered in the future". But there are a lot more VLEs than one, so I do desperately need the contribution to the project.

At the beginning of the week I read an article about how to run a successful open source project by approaching the development modularly. This is said to encourage users to write their own plug ins. This method has been a success for other open source project such as Mozilla FireFox, Drupal etc. But from a little investigation this is also a successful model for established software companies and one in particular Blackboard, where the community contribute "building blocks". As a result of this, I really need to be encouraging the current developing user community into becoming a contribution community, creating these needed plug ins/modules/widgets.

I have a feeling this maybe more successful than I thought it would. With the Web 2.0 movement, especially in Education, more and more individuals are developing these little code elements to accomplish tasks they need doing. Therefore, in an ideal world, those individuals should be happy enough to add modules for WebPA. This then has a knock on effect for me... I need to now go and assess the code to see how easy it will be for individuals to contribute. I will also need to make the changes to the system in order for this to work. Even if we do not see the benefits now, I hope that we see them some where in the future.

NOTE: I initiated a conversation on the Community-Development JISCmail list. The full conversation to date can be found at http://jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/COMMUNITY-DEVELOPMENT.html