Talks at other institutions

We've found out that there are a couple of other places out there using the Talks.cam code to publicise events. Birmingham University do, as well as the Electrical Engineering Department at Imperial College, London.

Even though the EGRET project is over, it's great to know that other universities are using our work in this area!

HCI2009

The Talks.cam team were invited to demonstrate at the HCI2009 Open House evening earlier this month. This was an exciting opportunity to showcase Talks.cam and the work of EGRET alongside many examples of the latest human-computer interface technologies and research.

Photos of the event are up on Flickr.

Our blurb on the programme was written by Alan Blackwell, one of the original creators of Talks.cam:

Talks.cam is a user-generated content system for publicising and syndicating information about talks and seminars around Cambridge. Talks.cam makes it easy to find information about events in Cambridge, and for seminar organisers to publicise those events. Talks.cam also feeds customised "what's on" information directly into the webpages of many organisations in Cambridge. Talks.cam turns the university inside out, accumulating research across disciplines, publicising and archiving current research without requiring 'knowledge transfer' intermediaries such as publishers and research funding offices.

the end of EGRET

Now we're in the closing stages, and submitting our final reports to JISC this week. It seemed like the perfect moment to celebrate the end of a successful project - with some Chelsea buns, the signature cake for the project. They didn't last long.


Many thanks to the entire project team at CARET - past and present - for all their hard work, and also to JISC and the support team, John Norman for directing our efforts, and the creators of Talks.cam.

Academic Networking Challenges

Read our latest report on the challenges of academic networking when recommending events, commenting on events, and noting attendance at events is involved.

The data structures of Talks.cam

As part of EGRET, and looking forward to future work involving talks and events, we've documented the data structures of Talks.cam so that others can understand how the system works.

You can read this functional description here.

Who uses Talks.cam anyway?

If you've ever wondered who uses Talks.cam, and why they find it valuable, we've got the answer! Our vignettes study gives a brief sample of some of our major types of users and use-cases.

HCI 2009

EGRET and Talks.cam are excited to have been invited to present at the HCI 2009 conference Open House on 2nd September 2009. This is the 23rd British Computer Society conference on Human-Computer Interaction, and a very prestigious event. We're lucky to be there, and looking forward to meeting lots of new people (and potential Talks.cam users!).

As the conference site says:

The 23rd BCS conference on Human Computer Interaction celebrates the people who use technology, the people who create new technologies, and the relationship between them. A centrepiece of the conference will be an Open House Festival involving the many Cambridge laboratories and startup companies now creating new displays, devices, games, communications and ubiquitous computing technologies. New developments in HCI depend on technology, and interchange between the communities will offer influence in both directions.

Final IRET meeting

Yesterday, Verity Allan and I ventured to Birmingham for the final IRET programme meeting. It was great to have a focus for our thoughts on institutionalisation of software and the issues around communicating our project outputs. The venue (the Studio in Cannon Street) was unusual but pleasant, with good snacks and paper with aeroplane folding instructions which I personally enjoyed - after the event! (On the other hand, we have no positive memories of the Pallisades NCP car park, other than that we did eventually escape...)

You can spot us in a couple of Josie Fraser's great pictures on Flickr - here and here.

Many thanks to Rob Bristow for doing a great job of shepherding us through the programme!

intersections of talks and networking

Over at CARET's JISC Academic Networking project, things have been very busy lately, with an intensive six-week user-centric design sprint to create, prototype, test and refine concepts to support academics with communications around teaching and learning. The project is all about bringing some of the affordances of consumer social networking tools to academia, using commercial-style user-centric research and design methods.

Without scooping our sister project's results, I can say that interestingly, "events" turned out to be a very strong paradigm behind one of the concept strands. This is very exciting from an EGRET point of view, and we're following the parallel work closely to see what it might bring for Talks.cam in the future and looking out for opportunities together.

Looking forward to meeting everyone again in Birmingham tomorrow! (And for those of you who track these things carefully, yes, I have been to Fitzbillies today...)

evolution

I've just read a fascinating talk from danah boyd, given at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest last month. "Web2.0 can be understood as hope" for business types. Is it the same for academics?

Browse the talk here.

"Social media is here to stay. Now we just have to evolve with it." - and that's what this project is about!

Musings on documentation

One of the challenges of institutionalisation for a system such as talks.cam is documentation. As projects pass from hand to hand through a process from innovative idea, through some kind of incubation, through to a fully supported service, people develop software, publicise their work, encourage others to use it, and answer questions, but very rarely do they update the documentation.

Static documents which describe what you might use a service for, and how to do it, are not fun for most people to write; it's hard work to put together coherent and useful documentation, and requires a great deal of organisation, communications skills, and empathy with the range of users (and visitors!) who might drop by your site and wish to learn more. Some readers will have problems they are trying to solve; others are simply trying to understand how something works. Some will wish to read up on a service thoroughly before they dive in as users; some will be "power users" already who are struggling with one particular tricky and perhaps obscure task. Catering to all of these with one main "help" page and contextual links is hard work, and it's perhaps understandable why software developers avoid it.

We've been tracking our helpdesk queries for Talks.cam since CARET took over the service, and also gathering comments from visitors and those who have come across Talks.cam from different places. It seems there are some frequently asked questions, which aren't being addressed by the current documentation, and so we are now undertaking a update of Talks.cam documentation, which should help new users get started, visitors see what it's all about, and existing users be empowered to get the best out of all the wonderful features built in to talks.cam.

Emerging technologies survey

Netskills are looking for information on how researchers, academics, and the people who support their work use emerging tools, such as Web2.0 things like twitter, flickr, Talks.cam and more. This is part of work funded by the JISC Users and Innovation (U&I) programme.

Please help them out by taking their survey!

They will use information from the survey to create guides to help others see how emerging technologies can help in research and teaching.

As part of the emerging technology world, it's great to see a helping hand being extended to those who might not be able to see how these innovative tools can help with every day activities.

Quiet releases and moving on

Two weeks ago, we slipped out an update release of Talks, nervously holding our breaths in case we had missed something we'd broken and an avalanche of upset users would descend on us, and ... nothing. Not a murmur. There were neither boos nor cheers. This small maintenance update, our first tentative steps at changing this software we inherited, had the ultimate success of nobody even noticing.

We saved the bigger changes we've been making -- such as the ongoing upgrade from an old version of Rails to something closer to current -- for a later release when we'd be feeling braver. So larger changes are to come, and new features will arrive that might yet stir a cheer.

But, and this is the other half of this post, it'll be someone else's ear that hears that cheer, as I have now moved on from Talks to a new role in Australia. Talks and EGRET are in the safe and capable hands of Laura, Raymond, and the steering group, and no doubt great things are around the corner. Best regards, and farewell.

Rake aborted! Unknown database

(This is a boring technical post, but useful if anyone else Googles the same issue)

While trying out an upgrade of Talks.cam to Rails 2.2, I happened to perform a RAILS_ENV=test rake db:drop

I was a little concerned, then, that every rake task, including RAILS_ENV=test rake db:create then complained Rake aborted! Unknown database talks2_testing.

It turns out that the issue is that within config/environments/test.rb, there is the following setting: config.cache_classes = true.  This causes rake to attempt to load all the classes (which involves inspecting the database), even if the task it is performing is creating the tables it needs to inspect.  So, the solution is to turn off class caching during database creation. 

Successful transitions

Allow me to introduce myself. I'm William Billingsley, a computing and HCI researcher and engineer, and I am one of the developers who has temporarily taken over development of Talks.cam, at least over the next couple of months. However, rather than just say "hello world", I thought it would be worth saying something about the transitioning process.

Many famous open source projects are centered around a charismatic individual, be it Linus Torvalds for Linux or Martin Dougiamas for Moodle. Rod Johnson, "the father of the Spring framework", even has his own action figure. For Talks.cam, of course, our charismatic original developer (Tom Counsell) moved on from Cambridge some time ago. So, we have to think carefully about how to ensure the vision, motivation, and technical development of the project survives each transition of development staff. We can't just rely on the drive and fame of a benevolent dictator to bind us together.

We have a very good starting point, in that we have a steering group that includes many people who have been attached to the project from the beginning, just not in development. And from a financial perspective, we have JISC's support in the EGRET project to improve and transform the system. However, there are also subtler factors we need to bear in mind. Each time someone new takes over lead development for the project, there is a learning overhead. Not just what the project is about and the language it is written in, but also fiddlier details such as how the system differs from other Ruby on Rails applications. For instance, since Talks.cam was written, the Rails platform has moved on a few versions, and newer versions of Rails do by default some things that had to be coded into Talks.cam by hand. For a single developer, there is very little point stripping out working code just in order to "be more standard", but for transitioning developers it can help to reduce the learning burden. The further from the norm Talks gets, the harder it would be for a new developer to learn -- and that's true even if its "the norm" that has been moving!

No doubt there will be other issues we need to deal with, and I'll probably mention them here as they come up. We want to ensure that, like Taggart or Doctor Who, while the faces may change, the show will go on.

that's August gone!

The last few weeks have been full of EGRET-related activity, although it has not all occurred under an EGRET banner. We've brainstormed social applications for academia (some of which are potential EGRET-related ideas) in a couple of forums. I somewhat belatedly sent off all the project planning documentation. I've also had some useful conversations about ways to incentivise adoption of social applications, and how to get over the usual initial barriers when there are only a handful of users to network with.

With Talks.cam helpdesk and jira bug-tracking set up, and Talks.cam hosted on our institutional servers here at CARET, we are making progress with the EGRET plan. We've had Talks.cam helpdesk tickets coming in, and it's been interesting to start to figure out both how to handle these in the short term and how to extend our helpdesk offering through the project.

Next week, we have one of the original Talks.cam authors coming in to train the team up on the codebase and architecture. We are all looking forward to learning new things, both about the code, and how to support users. Talks.cam is written in Ruby and this will be a new language for most of us here; I foresee O'Reilly Ruby and Rails books in our futures!

It's been hard to schedule sessions to learn about the existing system, as the original people have moved on to new things and have less time; this is one point I'll be bearing in mind for the institutionalisation study.

So, as usual for these early days, a lot of ideas-generation, some actual progress, but not many concrete outputs yet.

Summer days, drifting away

So, what's been happening on EGRET lately?

Many people involved with the project have been on summer holidays.

I've gathered (already!) a lot of fascinating examples of issues relating to institutionalisation of software, particularly with reference to CamTools, which is further along the path than Talks.cam. CamTools relaunched in a new version at the end of July, and we are now brainstorming ideas for next generation CamTools next year. One aspect of Camtools09, or CamToolsWow, or whatever we decide to call it, will be Talks.cam integration, and there will also be new social applications.

We'll be having a big team brainstorm about ideas for social applications within the university this afternoon. There are a lot of different angles for this, from academic apps to purely social ones, as well as many different user groups (students, researchers, administrators). I hope some of the ideas will be relevant to EGRET as well as our other projects which will have social aspects this year.

Do comment below if you have any suggestions for great apps we should think about!

BarCamb2

I was at BarCamb2 last Friday - a day of interesting talks and demos, held at the Sanger Centre near Cambridge.

Last year I'd given a presentation about AlertMe.com, but this time I just gave a short talk on Talks.cam (and by extension, EGRET). This was well-received, and it was fascinating to get feedback from audience members, who were a cross section of Talks users, people who used Talks but hadn't really realised they did, and those for whom it was new (many of whom had a go with the website on the day).



There was a lot of interest in syndication, unsurprisingly for a techie audience generally familiar with Ruby, RSS and iCal, and a wide range of ideas about how social features could tie in with Talks.cam, as well as some concerns. Some users felt the documentation was lacking and couldn't figure out how to get started with the site - definitely something which we'll be looking at, and an important consideration as projects get bigger, and users become less expert (or get less individual help to get them started). EGRET will definitely be looking into this issue. Others said they thought some kinds of social network functionality would be great (such as Amazon-style recommendations) but that "just having a facebook app" would be rather pointless; a range of interesting points, which will feed into our work on scoping out social networking.

Thanks to Matt Wood for organising another great event!

Highlights from the JISC Innovation Forum

Other than the opportunity to meet the other projects funded by the e-Administration programme, the Innovation Forum two weeks ago was a chance for me to learn more about the JISC and the kinds of people and projects working with it.

Interesting links:

• Web2Rights - info on copyright in the Web2.0 world
  
• UKFederation.org.uk - access and identity management for the UK HE sector
  
• OSSWatch - open source software advisory service
  
• OMII.ac.uk - open source software for research
  

Interesting topics:

• The challenges, or perhaps near-impossibility (?) of having a system of open data whilst still having a sustainable business model
  
• Tricky copyright issues and domains and contracts - such as when blog posts are assembled into a book, with a publishing contract stating content cannot be placed online
  
• The "golden age" - a decade of generous funding for the JISC and other HE technology projects - coming to an abrupt end with today's economic challenges (this from HEFCE)
  
• Open source is not the answer to sustainability of projects past their funding period. Remember: open source is "free" as in "free puppy" - you need to clean up after it, it's a lifetime cost of vet bills and food, and lots of owners abandon theirs. A "community" is not always the answer either - they need to be motivated and have the ability to help out on the tasks that need doing.
  
• Remember innovation is a socio-technical system - the people aspects are if anything the most important
  
  

Talks.cam / EGRET kick off meeting

Last week, to coincide with the launch of the latest version of Cambridge's VLE/VRE (CamTools), CARET hosted an initial meeting between EGRET people and the "owners" of Talks.cam. Out of the group of owners/managers listed here, Alan, David and Duncan were present.

We discussed a wide range of future features and business models for Talks, as well as the draft plan for EGRET work on Talks. The next step is a technical meeting to handover the next level of technological know-how to CARET, and then to get started with the EGRET work (both development and support training).