JISC Rapid Innovation event at City of Manchester stadium

At the beginning of September (Thrsday 3rd/Friday 4th September) Mike and I attended the JISC Rapid Innovation in Development event at the City of Manchester stadium and I’m finally getting round to a blog post…one way or another, things have moved on somewhat in the intervening weeks and now that we have XML – the lack of which was hanging over me like a dark cloud in Manchester (or was that, in fact, a dark cloud?)

Although not a City supporter it was a fantastic venue with great views over the rain-swept turf and had the added benefit for me of being nice and local; much more so, in fact, than a normal work day.

I had only learned the day before that all the projects represented at the event would be participating in a “45 second scramble” to deliver a lightening pitch of their project and found myself very much outside my comfort zone as I took my place in the queue before being handed the mic – itself discomforting when you’re not used to having your voice amplified! Fortunately, the organisers did a great job of putting us at our ease and the atmosphere was one of fun and mutual support; although that didn’t make the next stage of the exercise any less uncomfortable when we attended a Dragon’s Den style interview with a panel of three who made you watch your recorded pitch back and helped you analyse just what was wrong with it…oh, and tomorrow morning you’ll have to do it again. In 20 seconds.

I was given some good advice and in actual fact found the exercise very useful though still lacked the confidence to deliver my 20 seconds from the hip and read it out instead…one thing at a time!

Of course, the main issue for Bibliosight has been the ongoing difficulties with the WoS API and unlike other projects at the event, we didn’t yet* have anything like a prototype…which didn’t make the business of pitching any easier – all delegates were also interviewed by a live blogger at the event and I needed to think on my feet in order to present a cogent synopsis of our still nascent project… it will be interesting to see just how closely the final deliverables are to this still-theoretical overview.  I was able to speak with our programme manager who was supportive of the difficulties we have been having and acknowledged that unforseen problems like this are likely to arise due to the very nature of Rapid Innovation.

*As we do now have the updated documentation from Thomson Reuters and Mike has been able to return some XML from WoS using the API, a working prototype should be available soon.

I was also able to speak in some detail with @santychumbe from JournalTOCsAPI and in light of our problems, he suggested that we might want to experiment with their API in the meantime – at the very least this would contribute to software testing on another jiscri project and potentially also inform our own API development. However, as we now have XML ourselves from the WoS API and in view of the short timescales we are all working to for these projects, it’s probably unrealistic for us to look at JournalTOCsAPI in any great detail in the context of Bibliosight, though we are, of course, keen to liaise with Santy and his colleagues in the longer term and to input to JournalTOCsAPI in any way we can.

Note: Santy has just announced a release of the JournalTOCsAPI – http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/index.php?action=api – which I intend to have a closer look at immediately after this post as part of my preparation for next weeks meeting (29th Sept).

As I was so close to home I didn’t stay in the hotel with the other delegates so wasn’t able to partake of after-hours networking – and only belatedly learned that the poker chip in my delegate pack was actually for a free drink; had I realised I could have passed it on to a fellow delegate to the undoubted benefit of their project.  It did mean, however, that I was probably fresher on day two than some of my colleagues who had cashed in their chips, though a hangover might have been a welcome distraction from my impending lightning pitch!

In amongst our own specific and project-centric discussions there were lightening talks from various experts, a panel discussion on agile software development, lots of planned and impromptu software demonstrations (I saw a great SWORD app using the Adobe Air platform from @juliancheal that I want to get my hands on) as well as innumerable spontaneous fora coalescing throughout both packed days…@paulwalk wound things up with an introduction to DevCSI – Developer Community Supporting Community Innovation and has also posted about the event at http://blog.paulwalk.net/2009/09/04/jisc-rapid-innovation-event/.  All in all, one of the most enjoyable JISC events I have attended.