{"id":1057,"date":"2014-03-13T10:49:06","date_gmt":"2014-03-13T10:49:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/?p=1057"},"modified":"2014-03-13T11:16:47","modified_gmt":"2014-03-13T11:16:47","slug":"jisc-regeneration-or-rebranding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/2014\/03\/13\/jisc-regeneration-or-rebranding\/","title":{"rendered":"Jisc: Regeneration or Rebranding?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the last year JISC seemed to disappear. They have endured an internal restructring, and big cuts (in the name of austerity, I assume), and several of my friends lost their jobs when UKOLN was closed down. The good news is that the people at UKOLN seem to have all gone one to good, interesting jobs in other parts of the sector. To find out where some of them landed, see the <a href=\"http:\/\/ukoln-diaspora.org.uk\/\">UKOLN-diaspora<\/a><\/p>\n<p>At Southampton we have historically had more than &#8220;our fair share&#8221; of JISC money. Part of the reason for that, I think, was that we took on projects that were realistic, we ran them with the goal of producing something useful, rather than just to tick the boxes to fulfill the requirements, and that we staffed them with people who were primarily developers, rather than researchers. In the last year there&#8217;s been very little funding for projects like this, not just for us, but for the UK. This means that some very talented people have had to find jobs outside the sector. Rebuilding this skillset will take us many years even if we start now.<\/p>\n<h3>First they cancelled Firefly, then they cancelled Dev8D, what next? Bacon?<\/h3>\n<div id=\"attachment_1059\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1059\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1059\" alt=\"mmm, hyperbolicious.\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/files\/2014\/03\/Bacon-Sandwich-2-300x166.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"166\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/files\/2014\/03\/Bacon-Sandwich-2-300x166.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/files\/2014\/03\/Bacon-Sandwich-2.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-1059\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">mmm, hyperbolicious.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Some of these impacts were not obvious in advance, and a few things occur to me in retrospect.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Small JISC projects were like startups; most fail but a few can pay off big.<\/li>\n<li>Small JISC projects let people fail, and failing is how you learn not to fail next time. Many .ac.uk developers had the opportunity to learn their craft without being under the yoke of university central IT which by its nature is risk-adverse.<\/li>\n<li>Small JISC projects were sometimes exploited, I hear, as a way to keep paying a promising young researcher, in between the big projects. While this is an &#8220;exploit&#8221;, it may have prevented losing good young researchers who can&#8217;t afford not to be paid for 6 months between two big projects, so actually really have benefitted the sector.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Who moved my Cheese?<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-1060\" alt=\"How moved my Cheese?\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/files\/2014\/03\/9780091816971.jpg\" width=\"200\" height=\"215\" \/><\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Those days are over. In the big review of JISC, the mood was very much against these little projects. The days of things like <a href=\"http:\/\/redfeather.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/\">RedFeather<\/a> getting funded are past and we need to get over that and work out how to work in the new world order, where Jisc (ne. JISC) will, I understand, be looking at bigger projects and\u00a0 providing services to the sector.<\/p>\n<p>What we need to do is to still make sure there is still a career path from &#8220;comp-sci graduate&#8221; to &#8220;experienced innovator&#8221;. There&#8217;s a couple of ways we can do this.<\/p>\n<h3>Idea 1: Accept that innovation is part of the costs of running a university<\/h3>\n<p>First of all, universities need to realise that they need to grow this talent in-house. You can&#8217;t afford to hire people with the required talent and passion unless they have near zero experience or by sheer luck have to re-locate to your city. This is, I believe, also a very good way to get more female developers. If you can give women engineers a chance to love the subject and do cool things then they&#8217;ll love the subject and do cool things. As will the male ones. It may be that with the new approach to Jisc, university management need to wake up and realise that hiring, nurturing and retaining this talent is now something that has to be done with their own money, not JISC grants. This is going to be a difficult change because the obvious home for this is the university IT department, but the primary goal of the IT department is to provide reliable services at an affordable cost. Innovation is disruptive, and many IT managers will be spending time ensuring it doesn&#8217;t happen. I had a wonderful meeting once where I was asked by an IT manager at Southampton what best practice for university open data sites. His usual (and very reasonable) approach would be to find out what the leader(s) in the field are doing and learn from them. It was a culture shock that we *were* a leader, so were kinda making it up as we went along and learning from our mistakes.<\/p>\n<p>At Southampton, I am part of the &#8220;Technical Innovation &amp; Development&#8221; team. Not every university has one of those, and sometimes people want to sort us into our appropriate &#8220;boxes&#8221; in the normal IT structure, Networking, Databases etc, but so far that&#8217;s not happened and we&#8217;ve got enough wins under our belt that us bimbling along in a chaotic-good kinda way is now easier to justify.<\/p>\n<p>One thing I don&#8217;t like, but don&#8217;t know how to change, is that we&#8217;ve started hiring people for a fixed term project. When the money runs out we may lose those staff and the insight they&#8217;ve gained into the organisation. It would be nicer to hire people and then have them work on a project, but as part of the larger team, and when that project ends they rejoin the pool rather than just leave. It would also mean they were more likely to help with other team member&#8217;s projects and vice-versa. This way it&#8217;s not their time, specifically, on the project, but the team as a whole with them being the one foucssed on it. This is not easy when the budgets for permant staff salaries are being squeezed, so I&#8217;m not sure how realistic my idea is, but it would be nicer and better.<\/p>\n<h3>Idea 2: Split too-big-to-fail projects, into sub projects<\/h3>\n<p>If we&#8217;ve taken, say, a bajillion pound grant to design and deploy a national video conferencing network, then there&#8217;s no way we can allow this project to fail. It would be a reputation disaster and harmful if it didn&#8217;t happen. However we can look at this with more agile eyes and work out what the essential parts of the project are, and make sure those are more than fully resourced, but then take lots of other features, and give them to less experienced developers, who can start gaining that vital experience, but if their part failed entirely the main project would still deliver, but with one less bullet point on the list of nifty features.<\/p>\n<p>This idea is something the new Jisc can help with. I would like them to accept that you can&#8217;t, upfront, know exactly how a really big project will go, and sometimes as you go you discover opportunities which would not have been obvious up-front. The advantage of an in-house project is you can alter course, however with a funded project you often have to stick to the course you agreed because that&#8217;s what you were paid to do. That doesn&#8217;t get the best results. I&#8217;ve seen a few projects in the past that failed by succeeding. That is, they did exactly what they set out to do and ticked all the funder&#8217;s boxes, but actually learned that they should have done it a bit different but didn&#8217;t feel they could because that&#8217;s not exactly what they had been funded to do.<\/p>\n<p>So what I want to see from Jisc, on these big new initiatives, is:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Don&#8217;t write a detailed specification and make the project stick to it, allow them to negotiate adjustments as they learn the best solution.<\/li>\n<li>Get them to deliver early and often. Often the vital feedback on a project only comes after it&#8217;s been in use, and all the funding is already spent. Also, anything that&#8217;s open source should be open source from day one, not released at the end of the project.<\/li>\n<li>Allow the big project to have experimental aspects which may fail. Do not force the entire project to be risk-adverse when it isn&#8217;t part of the core functionality of the project.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Failing fast saves money. If an idea doesn&#8217;t pan-out it would be better to ditch it and try something else rather than to spend way to much time and effort on that one requirement. Often the project will be better served by cutting the loses and using the money &amp; time saved to do two other nifty features that can actually deilver.<\/p>\n<h3>Cold dead eyes?<\/h3>\n<div id=\"attachment_1061\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/RachaelBerryArt\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1061\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1061\" alt=\"I stole this image from Rachael Berry who is an amazing artist and you should buy her work.\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/files\/2014\/03\/eye-300x269.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"269\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/files\/2014\/03\/eye-300x269.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/files\/2014\/03\/eye.jpg 786w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1061\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">I stole this image from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/RachaelBerryArt\">Rachael Berry<\/a> who is an amazing artist and you should buy her work.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>One of the things I&#8217;ve heard much muttering about is that Jisc doesn&#8217;t care any more. For the past two days I&#8217;ve been at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jisc.ac.uk\/digifest\">Jisc Digifest<\/a>, which is sort of the relaunch party after a year of internal changes.\u00a0 If you believed some of the stuff I&#8217;ve heard over the last year, then the new Jisc is a soulless beast that cares nothing for the developers and will chew us up and spit us out.<\/p>\n<p>Nothing could be further from the truth. The biggest challenge I had in talking to Jisc staff about the difficulties of the past year is that I kept making them cry (really, and I&#8217;m so very sorry). They are very aware of how their being off the grid has distrupted our communities and care deeply about how we can make things good under the new guidelines from on high.<\/p>\n<p>What we shouldn&#8217;t do is just &#8220;wait and see what they do&#8221;. What we should do is engage with them early and often to understand their new objectives, and how to best design the new system to get all the secondary benefits we can, while achieving the new goals that resulted from the review.<\/p>\n<p>So please remember, whatever you think of the new policies, that Jisc staff are not your enemy. If you are angry at Jisc please direct this to their upper management, and the people who set <em>their<\/em> targets. It&#8217;s amazing that the staff have not become hardened and cynical this past year, please show them some love, they need it right now.<\/p>\n<h3>Looking fundable<\/h3>\n<p>Right now I reckon that they are going to be a bit risk adverse. They can&#8217;t afford to have any high-profile turkeys for a while. With that in mind I made sure that I had a raft of nifty work already started at data.ac.uk which they could fund-to-improve rather than fund-to-start. <a href=\"http:\/\/equipment.data.ac.uk\/\">Equipment.data<\/a> is funded by EPSRC, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.data.ac.uk\/data\">rest of data.ac.uk<\/a> is done partly in my own time, partly at work as\u00a0 20%-style project.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been a bit shameless in pointing out to Jisc staff all the niftiness we have that could be funded to fan the sparks into a fully realised and supported services or products. I would have never thought like this in the past, but right now I share my working space with two team-members both on fixed-term contracts so, for the first time in my life, this funding-thing is very real. They are my friends and have mortgages to pay. That said, by the time they get to the end of their current contracts they&#8217;ll have a buttload of experience in open linked data for organisations and right now that&#8217;s a very rare skill that&#8217;s going to be increasingly in demand.<\/p>\n<p>I can only really do this due to my position as a permanent member of innovation staff at the university. The people on fixed contracts need to (mostly) focus on what they are funded to do. I think this is going to be a sensible model for trying to gain Jisc funding; invest some time into building a proof-of-concept, or even starting a basic service as we have done. The first few iterations of an agile project. This massively reduces the risks of the money being wasted, and means that the university accepts the cost of a bit of innovation in the hope that some of it will gain funding later. It does require a good understanding of what the objectives new-Jisc has for their money, and that is something I don&#8217;t fully grok just yet; I need to see if the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jisc.ac.uk\/events\/jisc-digital-festival-2014-11-mar-2014\/keynote-speakers\">DigiFest keynotes<\/a> can give me a bit more insight. I missed them because I was manning our booth.<\/p>\n<h3>Rebranding<\/h3>\n<p>One thing I wasn&#8217;t a big fan of was that there was a bit of a feeling of &#8220;spin&#8221; at Digifest. The festival theme was a nice idea but didn&#8217;t quite work when everything is still a little tense. Jisc are trying hard to present an image, and I&#8217;m not really buying it just yet. I want to see what they <em>do<\/em> rather than what the image they try to put out.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t have a chance to see much of the talks at the digifest, but had many very interesting conversations with interesting people. Some gave me ideas, others I gave ideas to. I only caught two talks, those from Joss Winn &amp; Paul Walk (both Dev8D regulars). Both talks were about trying to bridge the gap between the developer and hacker mindset and university policy and management. Good stuff. Especially if I want a hope of one day rising above &#8220;Senior technicial specialist&#8221; without just giving up vi for good and becoming a people-manager.<\/p>\n<h3>Regeneration<\/h3>\n<div id=\"attachment_1058\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/files\/2014\/03\/petercapaldi1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1058\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1058\" alt=\"Change is difficult, but I'm  choosing to be optimistic until proved wrong.\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/files\/2014\/03\/petercapaldi1-300x195.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"195\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/files\/2014\/03\/petercapaldi1-300x195.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/files\/2014\/03\/petercapaldi1.jpg 460w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1058\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Change is difficult, but I&#8217;m choosing to be optimistic until proved wrong.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>So right now Jisc as an organisation have a lot to prove and some trust to re-win. I&#8217;m choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt and accept things are going to be different. I will have to let go of some of the things I liked about JISC in the past, but I&#8217;m pretty sure there will be some exciting things which they will be able to do now that they couldn&#8217;t before.<\/p>\n<p>The Dev8D community is still out there, we still talk and support each other and would love the chance to run events again to grow and strengthen the community and most importantly to meet the next generation of young developers.<\/p>\n<p>A final bit of good news is that the Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) is <a href=\"http:\/\/ukwebfocus.wordpress.com\/2014\/01\/20\/announcing-iwmw-2014\/\">un-cancelled<\/a>! It&#8217;s going to be run by CETIS instead of Jisc, but it&#8217;s great that it&#8217;s survived the kerfuffle.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the last year JISC seemed to disappear. They have endured an internal restructring, and big cuts (in the name of austerity, I assume), and several of my friends lost their jobs when UKOLN was closed down. The good news is that the people at UKOLN seem to have all gone one to good, interesting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,319127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-jisc-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1065,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions\/1065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}