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

Other JISC projects - open source, sustainability ... the lot

Following my post last week, related to whether it is feasible for WebPA to become sustainable and the impact of the funding, a post popped up on Rowins blog on essentially the same topic.

Rowin's post is about three JISC funded assessment tools. The three tools though have left becoming open source till their funding has ceased. So what is the future for these projects, well I don't know. I fear that, although there are seven developers and a sourceforge area, there is no wider community to support the future of these projects. Further funding would possibly extend their lives, but as pointed out time and time again, with no community to support the projects, is there a future in the short term worth paying out for.

I would love to know from all of the JISC funded projects, funded at the same time as WebPA;

• how many have released their code under open source,
• how many are beginning to build up a community to support their tools,
• who has waited till the end of the funding to release their tools,
• has any one really shouted loud enough to gather interest in the tools, to build the community's,
• is there any tool which is likely to reach sustainability.
  

I know that WebPA is the exception to all of those, but at times it has been a fight to get every ones buy in to the open source ethos and way of doing things. Some of the barriers and limitations on to the project have been discussed in this blog. I hope to continue raising these sometimes awkward points, at least till the funding ends for us too, or in the perfect world we reach sustainability.

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...