Transcript What If Web 2.0 Really Does Change Everything?

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/cetis-2007/
Responding To Change And
Institutional Challenges:
What if Web 2.0 Really Changes
Everything?
Brian Kelly
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath, UK
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Tag for session: ‘cetis-2007-conference-institutional-challenges’
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(but note caveat) www.ukoln.ac.uk
The Scenario
For this session imagine:
• You’re a small organisation with few developers
(and they tend to leave)
• You’re a developer and you want to do interesting
development
• You’re a user, and you want to make use of
technologies without being told by the IT Services
crowd what you should do
• You’re a member of the Senior Management
Team – and budget cuts are looming
How can Web 2.0 be used to support these scenarios?
Note after coffee you will explore the issues from a
perspective
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What If Web 2.0 Changes
Everything?
What you may expect:
What If Web 2.0 Changes Everything?
Web 2.0 is about:
• RSS, syndication
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Cool interfaces – Ajax
• Trusting your users
• Yaddy, yaddy yada
Haven’t CETIS conference attendees being doing this
a oflong
time?
know
all this stuff!
Afor
centre
expertise
in digitalYou
information
management
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What If Web 2.0 Really
Changes Everything?
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An alternative perspective:
What If Web 2.0 Really Changes Everything?
Web 2.0 is also about:
• The network as the platform
• Google, Yahoo, etc. as application providers
• New business models (not just funded by
the taxpayer or subscription services)
• The wisdom of crowds
• ‘Embracing constraints’ and ‘good enough’
solutions
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centre of expertise
in digital informationthis
management
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Would
we welcome
or feel threatened?
When Two Tribes Go To War
Recent (10 Nov
2007) post by Niall
Schlater (OU) on
concerns over the
reliability of
Slideshare …
..and response by
Tony Hirst (OU) on
concerns over the
reliability of OU
Intranet!
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When Two Tribes Go To War
Similar
disagreements
are taking
place at Leeds
University.
Why bother,
asks Nigel
Bruce, from
the IT Services
department?
Lots of reasons, responds Melissa Highton, Staff
Development in a talk at next week’s “Exploiting The
Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks” workshop.
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Exploring These Tensions
Aims of today’s session is to explore these
tensions:
• Why the diversity?
• How do we respond?
• Is there a single answer or do we need to
embrace the diversity?
Let’s explore the view of the keen Web 2.0ers
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The Real IE
The challenges
• Managing the risks
• Branding? Who cares (really?)
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Martin Poulter, ILRT on
Technologies For Resource
Sharing:
• Embeddability
• Services which can be
embedded provide
benefits for all
• Wikipedia generates
more traffic than HE
Academy – so let’s be
Wikipedia editors
• Let’s use 3rd party wikis
• …
Note see Intute blog post
about response to my
recent talk
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See <http://ancientgeeks.wordpress.com/2007/10/12/resource-sharing-in-academic-support/>
Revisiting The IE (nee DNER)
We had the early
visions for the JISC
DNER, developed
by Andy Powell
I subsequently
developed my view
for how the DNER
might develop:
• Applications on the
Web e.g.
bookmarking
(del.icio.us!) and
word processing
tools (Writely!)
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Web 2.0 As A DNER Development
The DNER got a lot right:
• Networked services
• Lightweight standards
• Importance of RSS
• Trust (in the funded institutions)
What we missed, which Web 2.0 is providing:
• Commercial providers of services
• New business models (we were Old Labour)
• Lightweight development
• User-generated content (we thought it would be
the professionals)
• Trust – in the individuals
• The power of the network – services which get
better
more
people
use them
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expertiseas
in digital
information
management
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Why We Should All Use Web 2.0
What we used to think:
• We’re in HE, and we have IT Services to provide
our IT needs (though we moan about them)
• JISC builds on this to provide additional services
What we (should) now realise:
• JISC & institutional services aren’t appropriate for:
 Our family photos, our music, …
 Use by our friends and families
 For social networking
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• We need our personal risk management strategies
(for our family digital heirlooms)
• Institutions may feel a need to ensure students
familiarise themselves with such services
• Academics are likely to make use of such services
A centre of
in digital information management
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inexpertise
any case
Can’t We Just Do it In-house?
Surely all we need to do is:
• Use Ajax to enhance our user interfaces
• Provide the popular (and increasingly expected)
‘favourite’, ‘comment’, ‘message; … social
networking features within our own services and
managed environments
• We can then avoid the spam, porn, misuse, …
But:
• Have we got the mindset, the development
processes, …?
• Can we expect to compete with the global
providers - remember home-grown operating
systems?
• What about the 1-9-90 rule?
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Globalisation talk
The 1 – 9 – 90 Challenge
Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to
Contribute
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who
never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users
account for almost all the action. (Jakob Neilson, Oct 2006)
Potential Benefits:
Potential Dangers:
• Globalisation
• Globalisation
• Cross-fertilisation
• Mono-culture
• Unexpected benefits
• Unexpected dangers
• Maximising impact
• Loss of impact
There are dangers associated with going down this route, with
developing
alternative
approaches
and doing nothing www.ukoln.ac.uk
A
centre of expertise
in digital information
management
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Globalisation talk
Why I’m A Fan of Slideshare
http://www.slideshare.net/lisbk/...
Slideshare:
• Easy to upload slides
• Can be embedded in Web
pages
• Statistics provided
More importantly:
• Annotation facility
• Slides can be ‘favourited’
• I can see my fans, and the
other slides they like
Would this level of popularity be • Amazon style “readers who
possible on an institutional or
bought this book also liked
even national
repository?
these”
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in digital information management
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Open Development
Readers & contributors to UK Web
Focus blog come from all over globe
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Truly open development helps deliver sustainable open source
applications, such as Apache (Ross Gardler, JISC OSS Watch)
Open development can also help provide enhance quality of ideas
A
centre
of expertise
in digital information
management
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and
provide
sustainable
content,
communities, …
Globalisation talk
Is It Risky?
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/
londoninmaps/exhibition.html
Scenario
What happens if a third party
provider goes out of business?
Application Elsewhere
What will happen to our life
savings if our bank goes out of
business? Do we keep our
money under the mattress?
And note recent Guardian
headline “Secret List of
Universities Facing
Collapse”
There’s a need for risk assessment, risk management, etc. But this also
applies when
you
are developing
software,
procuring development
work, etc.
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of expertise
in digital information
management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
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Some facts
People are going to talk about you…
… down the pub, in the local post office or on a social networking site
or blog… they’ll still talk… they still say the same things…
The boundaries are blurred; it’s common to mix
business/study with pleasure
Students don’t come into Uni and leave their
personal lives at home…
… but neither do staff!!!
Slides from talk on “Put Yourself Out There” by Alison Wildish, Head of Web
Services, Edge Hill University at UKOLN workshop on “Exploiting The
PotentialAOf
Blogs
and Social
Networks”
on 26 Nov 2007.
centre
of expertise
in digital information
management
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Regardless of
any institutional
policy our
students and
staff will use
social
networking sites
Image courtesy of Wanderer
and of
Wonderer
on Flickr
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expertise
in digital information
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management
www.ukoln.ac.uk
Living In A Blended World
We’ve been through changing times before:
• Demise of mainframe
• Growth of PCs
• Demise of Computer Board • Growth of Google
Need to engage:
• The stuff that just works
Just do it
• Supporting distributed team working
Need to understand:
• The stuff that users use, place they go
(e.g. Facebook, Slideshare, …)
Need to embed (it’s not surrender):
• Enhancing quality of 3rd party services
• Content in Wikipedia
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Conclusions
• Times have changed
• The simplicity of the past won’t return
• We need to
 Reflect on our past (successes and failures)
 Understand what makes successful services
 Engage with success
 Identify our (possibly new) roles
• If we do this, we can continue to thrive
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D
Discussion
Things to think about:
• Is this a realistic vision?
• Is this what people are thinking?
• What are the problems?
• Can the problems be managed?
• …
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My Thoughts
SLAs with
students
Sustainability
Legal issues
Expectations
Change
control
Challenges
Refuseniks
Multiple
IDs
Service
limitations
In-house tensions,
arguments
No strategic
vision
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Questions
Any questions?
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