OSS Watch Advisory Committee Meeting Minutes, 12 September 2005 (draft)

by Randolph Metcalfe on 21 September 2005

Introduction

Attendance and Action Summary

Present: Phill Camp, Chris Cartledge, Barry Cornelius, Mike Fraser, Brian Kelly, Randy Metcalfe, John Norman, Sebastian Rahtz, Andrew Savory

Apologies: Julian Bream, Paul Browning, Paul David, Nicole Harris, Bill Olivier, Alan Robiette, Ronnie Scott, Stephen Tanner, George Vernon

Chair: John Norman

Action Summary:

• OSS Watch manager to confirm ongoing committee membership of those members who have served two-years or more.

Welcome and introductions

The Chair welcomed all present and thanked Brian Kelly of UKOLN for hosting this meeting of the advisory committee.

Minutes from previous meeting

The minutes from the meeting of 24 February 2005 were reviewed and accepted.

Matters arising

Actions from the 24 February 2005 meeting:

• further comments on the JISC open source policy need to be received by Alan asap - done The Chair thanked the committee for contributing to the final version of the JISC policy. He noted that the policy had been approved by the appropriate JISC committees and would be published by the JISC executive shortly. [NB. The JISC Open Source Policy is now published.]

Committee membership and Chair election

The committee unanimously re-elected John Norman for a second year as Chair of the OSS Watch advisory committee. John thanked those present for their continued confidence.

The Chair noted that the committee membership had increased by one since the last meeting with the addition of Bill Olivier, Development Director (Systems and Technology), JISC.

In reviewing the terms of reference for the committee it was noted that membership in the OSS Watch advisory committee will be for two years in the first instance. As this advisory committee meeting marked the end of the first two years, the OSS Watch manager was asked to seek agreement from all committee members who had completed their initial two-year stint to confirm their willingness to continue on the committee.

Action:OSS Watch manager to confirm ongoing committee membership of those members who have served two-years or more.

Manager’s Report

On 1 September 2005, Randy Metcalfe took over from Sebastian Rahtz as Manager of OSS Watch. Sebastian takes on the new role of Service Director. The Manager’s report was thus divided neatly into activities that had taken place since the last committee meeting, reported on by Sebastian, and current and proposed activities for the near future, reported on by Randy.

Discussion of the reports was integrated into their presentation. Actions have been noted.

OSS Watch activities February-July 2005

Sebastian offered a report of OSS Watch’s activity between February and July 2005 under the following headings:

• briefing papers
• general communications
• presentations
• conferences and workshops
• software distribution
• FE roadshows (on which more anon)

He noted that the themes involved in OSS Watch’s work over this period included:

• building communities
• open source policies
• document rigour
• wiki development

The staff complement consisted of:

Sebastian Rahtz

Manager (0.4FTE)

Randy Metcalfe

Communications Manager (1.0FTE)

Rowan Wilson

Research officer (0.5FTE)

Stuart Yeates

Research officer (0.5FTE)

Barry Cornelius

Development Officer (0.5 FTE)

Judy McAuliffe

Administration

Hannah Dunnington

Events Management (0.3FTE)

Elena Blanco

Documentation editor and author (freelance)

Salary from delayed start of Barry Cornelius pays for commissioned work from Elena Blanco.

In April-May 2005 Randy Metcalfe served as acting OSS Watch Manager. During those months Sebastian was based in East Timor where he was writing a book on the Text Encoding Initiative. Before returning, however, Sebastian undertook a lecture tour of Australian universities on behalf of OSS Watch.

Workpackages

The OSS Watch Project plan has the following workpackages whose status is found in the following table:

Briefing Material

The following list shows titles of the briefing notes published since February

• Creative Commons and Open Content
• Linux in a Windows World - review
• A guide to participating in an open source software community
• Open source email clients
• Open source and the web admin
• Software Patents
• UK Patent Office Technical Contribution Workshop - report
• A Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies - review
• Open source and the web browser
• Knoppix Hacks - review
• Open Source Development - An Introduction to Ownership and Licensing Issues
• FOSDEM - report

During this past six months OSS Watch has introduced new measures to ensure document rigour. All OSS Watch technical writing continues to be prepared in validated XML, and checked by two members of staff. However, a formal process has been introduced for the review of our published documentation in order to ensure its continued accuracy and relevance. All documents are now reviewed on a 6-monthly basis and archived or rewritten if required.

A small number of articles were published about OSS Watch.

• Article in Physics World insert “Software Challenges and Solutions” page 6, June 2005 http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/18/6/34/1
• Choosing Open Source Solutions 05 July, 2005 http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/oss

Media coverage of OSS Watch appeared in the following:

• Egov Monitor, 23 June 2005
• Letter to the editor, Financial Times, 8 June 2005
• RSC Northern Ireland newsletter, June 2005
• Open source software alternatives help universities focus on what works, Innovations Report, 29 April 2005
• A Path Through The Intellectual Property Rights Swamp, Managing Information, 28 April 2005
• A Path Through The Intellectual Property Rights Swamp, JISC website, 19 April 2005

Conferences

On 4 July 2005, OSS Watch held a national conference on the them of Building Open Source Communities. The following presentations were made:

• What is an open source software community? Sebastian Rahtz, Manager, OSS Watch
• Licences, Features, and Community: The Path to Sustainability Jim Farmer, Community Liaison, Sakai Educational Partners Program
• Co-located agile development Helen Sharp, The Open University
• Serving Maths: Experiences from a JISC Distributed e-Learning Project Gustav Delius, University of York
• Life and times in the Apache community Andrew Savory, Director, Luminas
• MoodleMoot: Meeting Real People from a Virtual Community Sean Keogh, UK Moodle Partner

Collaborations

OSS Watch has been involved in a signficant number of collaborations over the past six months.

• Queen Mary University - half-day workshop on licensing
• Australian Government Management Information Office - half-day discussion
• JISC Mirror Service - steering group
• Digital Curation Centre - document consultation
• Bodington VLE project - ongoing building communities and licensing consultation
• UKOLN - planning stages of joint Creative Commons workshops
• JISC IPR Consultation workshops - invited participation
• JISC Click project - consultation
• British Computer Society - Open Source Special Interest Group
• Oxford University Computing Services - Linux desktops
• Open Source Skills Committee - developing skills framework, with Open Forum Europe, UKUUG, OpenAdvantage, Sun, HP and others
• Moodle - meeting with Martin Dougiamas and participation in MoodleMoot 2005
• LAMS - business models
• Educause - OSS Watch invited to blog on their site
• OMII - consultation on OMII future plans
• CCLRC - licence discussions and planning IPR workshops
• SIGOSSEE - German translations of OSS Watch briefing documents
• GNU EPrints - building communities consultation
• JISC eLearning programme - ongoing consultation

As mentioned, while Sebastian was in Australia he undertook a series of presentations and consultations for OSS Watch.

Stuart Yeates has been a regular blogger on the Educause site since May 1st, and has clocked up 118 entries, making him one of their key providers of information on the state of open source in education in Europe.

Survey

As an early preparation for the repeat of OSS Watch’s national survey on open source deployment, an informal study was conducted of Linux desktop deployment across the colleges and departments at the University of Oxford. Questions included

• What distros are used at Oxford?
• What releases of distros are used?
• How did they choose a distribution?
• What is the most used distribution?
• Who uses the Linux desktop?
• Who has root access?
• How are machines patched?
• When do machines get OS releases?
• What software is installed?
• What discipline-oriented software?
• Can other software be installed?
• Can the desktop run a webserver?
• Can the user access MS Windows? The results indicate more widespread use of Linux desktops than anticipated but with inconsistent deployment policies.

JISC

A Senior Management Briefing paper was prepared in July 2005 for the JISC Communications Team and it is expected that this will be published in October or November 2005, with associated guidance materials on licensing.

OSS Watch continued its close work with many JISC projects engaged in open source software development.

Presentations

During the past six months OSS Watch has made a substantial number of presentations, by invitation:

• 7-8 July 2005, JISC Development Joint-Programmes meeting
• 6-8 July 2005, Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: Whose Web Is It Anyway?, Manchester
• 29 June 2005, 29 June 2005, TASI seminar: Effective Use of Digital Images in Education Resources, Bristol
• 21-24 June 2005, EUNIS 2005 - Leadership and Strategy in a Cyber-Infrastructure World, Manchester
• 23 June 2005, Oxford IT Support Staff Conference, Oxford
• 23 June 2005, RSC East Midlands e-learning Fair, Derby
• 16 June 2005, RSC Yorkshire & Humberside elearning conference
• 15 June 2005, RSC London and Eastern, The Open Source Software Roadshow, London
• 26 May 2005, Open source perspectives from the UK, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
• 24 May 2005, Open Source Software in Education Workshop, Macquarie University E-Learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE), Australia
• 23 May 2005, Open source perspectives from the UK, Curtin University, Perth, Australia
• 19 May 2005, Introduction to open source software, Software Libre conference, Universidade Nacional de Timor Leste, Dili, East Timor
• 28-29 April 2005, AURIL (Association of University Research & Industry Links) Spring Conference, Edinburgh
• 12 April 2005, JISC Conference, Birmingham
• 5-6 April 2005, JISC e-Learning Programme Meeting: Framework and Tools and Distributed e-Learning Strands, Birmingham
• 1 April 2005, Open Source Open Minds, The Netherlands
• April 2005, NILTA National Technical Conference
• 22 March 2005, JISC IPR Consultation Workshop: Rights in Digital Environments
• 16 March 2005, Models of Success, RSC Wales, Cardiff
• 15 March 2005, OSS Watch - RSC Roadshow, hosted by RSC North West
• 15 March 2005, RSC West Midlands Annual Conference, Wolverhampton
• 14-15 March 2005, Coimbra Group workshops on eLearning Quality in eLearning and Open source/Open standards, Edinburgh
• 11 March 2005, RSC London Moodle Regional User Group
• 3 March 2005, JISC IPR Consultation Workshop: Rights in Digital Environments
• 26-27 February 2005, Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM), Brussels
• 24 February 2005, OSS Watch Advisory Committee meeting
• 23 February 2005, OSS Watch - RSC Roadshow, hosted by RSC East Midlands

Software Distribution

OSS Watch remasters the Knoppix LiveCD with additional relevant software such as Moodle, Bodington and Reload. OSS Watch also distributes TheOpenCD to raise awareness of open source software suitable for a Windows operating system.

• Customized releases of Knoppix 3.6 for OSS Watch general release (Moodle, Reload, etc) - 2000 copies distributed
• Bodington Knoppix - 200 copies distributed
• Text Encoding Initiative Members meeting (XML tools)
• TheOpenCD 2.0 - more than 500 copies distributed

Web matters

• Web page redesign
• Wiki developed (using MoinMoin)
• New navigation routes introduced

Stakeholder-based navigation

The initial transformation of the OSS Watch website was to move to stakeholder-based navigation. A series of meta-navigational documents were written giving alternate routes to OSS Watch content.

Licensing

The OSS Watch plan specified that all documents produced should be released using the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). After due consideration a decision was taken to change to a Creative Commons UK licence for OSS Watch documentation:

• agreed by the Advisory Committee in February 2005
• agreement sought and received from the University of Oxford Research Services Office
• confirmation of move obtained from JISC programme manager
• relicensing plan implemented for the OSS Watch site in August 2005 The main licence used is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, whose effect is almost identical to that of the GFDL which it replaces.

Licensing markup in source code

OSS Watch plans and current projects August-December 2005

Randy took up the reporting at this point and promised that the year ahead would be even busier than the one just past:

• wiki
• website (redesign)
• presentations
• evaluation
• national survey
• conferences and workshops
• sustainability study
• sustainability conference

OSS Watch Wiki

During August and September the OSS Watch team have been preparing the launch of a new public wiki for OSS Watch http://wiki.oss-watch.ac.uk/. This has involved a number of steps over the past year:

• evaluation of internal wiki intranet
• establishing criteria for public wiki
• wiki selection
• Moin Moin experimentation
• issues list
• initial policy decisions, e.g. licensing, requiring registration, etc.
• gradual introduction of content and extended roll-out

This wiki is for those who use it. Its success depends entirely upon the participation of the community. OSS Watch staff will be participating in the ongoing creation of content, as well as serving as wiki gnomes tidying the content of others. But OSS Watch will not be constraining the further development of the wiki.

Website redesign

Between August and October OSS Watch is undertaking a substantial overhaul of its website. There are two principal reasons for this redesign:

• the weight of ever increasing content
• the need for a fresh accessible design

During the past year OSS Watch has published more than 40 briefing notes and other documents. With an equal number of documents likely to follow, it is increasingly clear that new means need to be found to deliver this content.

An initial move in this direction was made in the Spring of 2005 when meta-navigational documents for each of the key stakeholder groups were added to the website.

During the current redesign an effort has been made to organise OSS Watch’s resources around key themes. The result will be a website which facilitates access to its content through:

• stakeholder meta-navigational documents
• resource themes
• indexed search
• featured article spotlights Together these should make access to the content that matters for our users even easier.

The process of redesign also offers up the possibility of moving to a new design standard that is both fresh and accessible:

• no tables
• presentation handled entirely with CSS
• degrades gracefully
• focus is on access to content

The new website and wiki should be ready for launch by mid-October 2005.

Presentations

OSS Watch will continue to press the case for sensible treatment of free and open source software in such places as:

• NILTA National Technical Conference
• SIGOSEE/JOIN Conference
• JISC Joint Programmes meetings
• BCS SIG on Open Source
• and many more

External evaluation

OSS Watch is about to engage in a process of external evaluation. External evaluation is a component of most JISC projects. In OSS Watch’s case, the goals are to:

• assess how well OSS Watch is fulfilling its brief
• provide recommendations for fine-tuning that brief

National survey

OSS Watch’s initial Scoping Study was conducted Oct-Nov 2003. This significantly aided the early development of OSS Watch’s effort. The new survey will:

• provide key comparison data
• provide more fine-grained data in key areas

The new survey may:

• reveal new areas of concern for stakeholders
• reflect a step-change in awareness amongst stakeholders
• set the agenda for OSS Watch in the future

Conferences and workshops

OSS Watch’s key theme for conferences and workshops in the immediate future is licensing.

Sustainability

OSS Watch has been contacted with a request to manage a JISC study on sustainable models of software development. The study

• examines 7 models for sustainability
• will commission case studies by a variety of active participants
• will result in summary recommendations

The JISC sustainability study, should OSS Watch take it on, will complement the theme of OSS Watch’s largest conference yet: Sustainability and Open Source Software. This international event is scheduled for 10-12 April 2006 in Oxford.

Discussion

The committee discussion during and after the two reports concentrated on five areas

• The new web site design was analysed in some detail, and the committee was supportive of the approaches being taken to provide targeted information for stakeholder groups. The change to CC licensing was welcomed, with discussion about take-up and reuse of documents, which the OSS Watch staff were keen to stress is already happening. Mike Fraser noted that making the metadata more widely available, e.g. via OAI, might be useful.
• The extent to which JISC programme managers and projects are taking up the (unpublished) open source policy was debated. Projects have a tendency not to ask for direct advice but simply quote from OSS Watch published documents. It was stressed that the sustainability of JISC projects does not just depend on applying an OSS licence though the broader concepts surrounding OSS are also useful, and noted that the OMII is seeking JISC funds to assist with the sustainability issues. Learning from failure is also important. Bodington was cited as an example of another project from which lessons might be learnt (both good and less good). There was a recommendation to increase collaboration with Sakai (which has both developer and political aspects). It was noted that Stuart Yeates now works on SAKAI-related project as well as OSS Watch, providing useful cross-over.
• In the government sector, the new Open Source Academy was mentioned, though there is not much information publicly available. Phill Camp said that his institution was involved in this.
• OSS Watch’s role in open source and e-learning was regarded as an important area to work in. In a VLE procurement process, for example, who presents the sales pitch? Does OSS Watch have a role to play in this area? Oxford is apparently in the business of promoting Bodington to other institutions, and there are JISC e-learning events to bring together demonstrations of Moodle, Bodington and other open source products in an open day. OSS Watch can have a role as an honest broker in such events; it was stressed by the OSS Watch staff that they were already primary speakers at VLE events, but they would continue to pay much attention to this.
• Sebastian Rahtz circulated a document outlining points about open source which HE/FE institutions might address in their IT policies; he said that he was trialling this in Oxford, trying to see where and how some key points (eg on staff contribution to OSS) might best be discussed. The committee debated this at some length, with some scepticism about how easily such points would be considered, and how portable they were, but welcomed the discussion.

Date of next meeting

t.b.c. (either late January or early February), Norwich 11:00 - 15:30 with lunch provided. Andrew Savory has kindly offered to host this meeting.