OSS Watch Advisory Committee Meeting Minutes, 29 October 2007 (draft)

by Elena Blanco on 29 October 2007

Introduction

Present: Tony Linde (chair), Ross Gardler (OSS Watch Manager), Rowan Wilson (OSS Watch), Elena Blanco (OSS Watch), Ann Borda, Phill Camp, Mike Fraser, Brian Kelly, John Norman.

Apologies: Andrew Charlesworth, Bill Olivier, Mike Banahan.

Not present: Matthijs den Besten, Andrew Savory, Sally-Anne Saull, Scott Wilson, Stephen Tanner

Welcome

TL opened the meeting at 10.30am welcoming those present.

Minutes from 20 February 2007

The minutes were agreed to be an accurate record.

Actions arising

• Bill Olivier was to investigate the Ithaka report, to see what JISC was doing which was comparable. BO not present, but RG has received comments from Bill which have been incorporated into the draft proposal due for discussion later today. Action completed.
• TL had requested a progress report on OSS Watch’s tech transfer activities at the next Advisory Committee meeting. Rowan Wilson (RW) will be delivering a presentation later today. Action completed.
• BK agreed to talk at the next Advisory Committee meeting about community engagement work undertaken in the JISC User and Innovation Programme. BK will incorporate comments in the discussion of the draft proposal this afternoon. Action completed.

Manager’s report

RG described the progress of OSS Watch since the last Advisory Committee meeting in February 2007.

Staffing currently stands as follows:

During the reporting period the following content items have been produced:

• Open source software for the keen photographer, February 2007
• Project Catalogues and Project Descriptors using DOAP, February 2007
• Benefits of open source code, March 2007
• Choosing a Linux Distribution, March 2006
• Finding your way around SourceForge, April 2007
• Exim: a case study in sustainability, June 2007
• Moodle: a case study in sustainability, July 2007
• A 2007 overview of JISC projects in terms of openness, August 2007
• Creating a new Google Code project, August 2007
• DSpace: a case study in sustainability, August 2007
• Sakai: a case study in sustainability, August 2007
• MailScanner: a case study in sustainability, August 2007
• APLAWS: a case study in sustainability, August 2007
• GPL v3 - What’s New?, September 2007
• Apache Cocoon: a case study in sustainability, September 2007
• Survey of inbound MTA servers, October 2007 RG reported that OSS Watch would be pushing forward with the commissioning of external content. TL suggested talking to TechWatch and was assured that this had already taken place. Referring to the recent study of JISC projects with regard to openness, BK asked whether the OSS Watch view of openness reflected what the community thinks of as open. He cited the example of accessibility where views are often too academic, not real world enough. RG responded that the JISC open source policy takes a hard line approach and represented best practice in the real world. Consequently, OSS Watch took the same approach whilst noting that this form of openness is not always applicable if a project does not aim to reach sustainability through open source software.

The following OSS Watch events have taken place during the reporting period:

• Single Source Publishing with Apache Forrest, February 2007
• Selecting a Linux distro, February 2007
• Copyright in online resources, February 2007
• OpenOffice course, March 2007
• Foundations of Openness, development workshop, March 2007
• Free and Open Source Software: How and Why?, AURIL/OSS Watch full-day workshop, April 2007
• Open source for photographers, June 2007
• Copyright in online resourcesCopyright in online resources, June 2007
• Community Workshop (National), July 2007
• Introduction to survey design (with OII), October 2007

OSS Watch staff have attended the following external conferences during the reporting period:

• Capitalizing Community: open source business models relevant to institutional tech transfer units, February 2007
• JISC Conference, March 2007
• Digital Freedom: Why an Open Technology future is vital to us all, March 2007
• National Open Centre launch at the Houses of Parliament, March 2007
• Technology for LifeLong Learning conference, “Open Source in Higher Education” (presentation), Randy Metcalfe, Salzburg, Austria, April 2007
• Next Generation Environments Conference, April 2007
• Institutional Web Management Workshop (OSS Watch stand and workshop session), May 2007
• Emerge community event, May 2007
• RSC regional event (1), August 2007
• RSC regional event (2), August 2007
• JISC Skills Day (presentation and breakout session), September 2007
• Westminster eForum key note, September 2007
• Open Inventions Network round table, October 2007
• Software Freedom Law Centre Legal Summit in New York, October 2007
• Open Schools Alliance conference, October 2007
• Moodle Moot, October 2007

JISC project support has become increasingly proactive with JISC encouraging consultation during bid writing. Since the start of this funding period OSS Watch has attended project start-up meetings, has conducted 26 face to face consultations and is currently conducting telephone/email consultations at a rate of approximately 5 per month. RG noted that OSS Watch had been approached on two occasions to help with two separate bids with 5 days and 3 hours notice respectively to the bid deadline! Project support activities since the last committee meeting have included:

• ASK sustainability plans, February 2007
• WebPA project - initial consultation meeting, March 2007
• Oxford Research Archive consultation, March 2007
• Local government cultural and management issues relating to FOSS adoption, March 2007
• Frockle consultation, April 2007
• CCPForge consultation, April 2007
• WebPA licence consultation, April 2007
• JPC consultation meeting at ISIS Innovation, April 2007
• ME-Aggregator consultation, April 2007
• Phosphorix Consultation, June 2007
• eIUS Consultation, June 2007
• Aporia Green proposal development, July 2007
• Aporia Green proposal development (follow up), August 2007
• City of Learning consortium, August 2007
• Repositories Support Project, August 2007
• Documents and Manuscripts VRE project, September 2007University of Sussex (Carol Shergold), October 2007 There was some discussion regarding engagement with JISC services in addition to projects. RG reported that a meeting was booked with OMII-UK and UKOLN and a meeting with JISC CETIS is planned. OSS Watch is also trying to engage with CCP Forge (although they are not a service they do engage with lots of different projects). There was further discussion about the possibility of engaging with NetSkills; AB thought that they may well be interested.

RG cited WebPA as a shining example and the most open of the projects OSS Watch has consulted with. Consultation was invited via contact from a developer who wanted help to convince their team to do things in an open way. As a result WebPA is not only building community around the project but is also helping to spread the community message. RG observed that if we could find 3 or 4 more projects like this it would provide real examples of why openness is important in our domain. TL suggested following up with projects already consulted with - this is in hand with the extra effort from EB.

OSS Watch’s Liaison and collaboration activities consist of representation at third party events including JISC events, consultations with the JISC executive and engagement with other organisations such as BSC OSSG, SFLC, OSC. Activities have included:

• JISC e-Framework workshop, February 2007
• National Open Centre Advisory Board meeting, February 2007
• Joint position paper with Matthijs den Besten for NESC workshop “Realising and Coordinating e-Research Endeavours”, March 2007
• TechWatch report published “What is Web 2.0?” (peer reviewed), March 2007
• Software Freedom International, board meeting and planning sessions for worldwide Software Freedom Day 2007, (facilitated by OSS Watch), March 2007
• Joint paper (Brian Kelly, Randy Metcalfe, Scott Wilson) presented at the ELPUB conference, 13-15 June 2007, Vienna, Austria
• Report of the Licensing and Policy Summit for Software Sharing in Higher Education, March 2007
• Apache Corporate License Agreement signed on behalf of all OSS Watch staff, March 2007
• User and Innovation Programme, working group meeting, March 2007
• E-Learning Projects Induction Day, April 2007
• Review of “Open Source in Open Education: Promises and Challenges”, by Christopher J. Mackie, at request of JISC, April 2007
• Sharing anonymized data-set from 2006 survey with FLOSSWorld survey, April 2007
• Comments on “Adopting Open Source Software Applications in US Higher Education,” for peer reviewed journal, April 2007
• JISC-HEA Collaboration meeting, April 2007
• JISC patent policy planning (planning meeting), May 2007
• Google Summer of Code (ASF coordinator and Forrest mentor), June 2007
• Comments on a document on IPR and patents for the JISC, July 2007
• Science and Technology Facilities Council (licence advice), July 2007
• Google Summer of Code (ASF coordinator and Forrest mentor) (cont…), July 2007
• Assisting Sakai project in getting writing an acceptable Wikipedia page, August 2007
• Google Summer of Code (ASF coordinator and Forrest mentor) (cont…), August 2007
• BCS Open Source Specialist Group (collaboration meeting), September 2007
• Open Rights Group (collaboration meeting), September 2007
• Web Focus (guest blog), September 2007
• Federated Access Management (JISC Services Briefing Day), September 2007
• National Institute of Health Research Information Systems Programme PIN, September 2007
• Federated Access Management Briefing Day, September 2007
• Comments on the European IP charter at the request of the JISC, September 2007
• Working with the DOAP community to extend DOAP so our registry can do what it needs to do, October 2007
• Installation guide for LimeSurvey (which has been offered to the project), October 2007
• Mentoring a new project (RAT) in the Apache Incubator, October 2007
• Exploratory meetings with the Open Source Consortium, October 2007
• Exploratory meeting with BECTA, October 2007
• Simon Whittemore (JISC business and Community Engagement), October 2007

RG stressed that OSS Watch needs to better understand the interfaces between BCE and education. OSS Watch is increasingly involved with projects that are not JISC funded. These include extending the DOAP registry, a lime survey installation guide, and RG is involved with mentoring a new project in the Apache incubator.

Technology transfer support concerns the activity of working with institutional tech transfer units towards a better understanding of open source business models. RG deferred a detailed discussion of tech transfer activities until RW’s presentation later on but did indicate that the following activities have taken place:

• Meeting with Simon Whittemore, Business and Community Engagement, March 2007
• City of Learning consortium, IPR issues, July 2007
• Phosphorix (relates to City of Learning), August 2007
• Assisted National Institute of Health Research Information Systems in reaching open source suppliers for a recent Provisional Information Notification, September 2007

OSS Watch’s web based services have developed and expanded. The website is receiving approximately 12,000 genuine page views per month. Search engines are the number 1 and 3 top referers (Google and Yahoo respectively) with direct traffic number 2, wikipedia number 4 and JISC Infonet number 5. The team Blog is going well with more than 80 posts and more than 100 genuine comments (approx 100 spam comments per day) and the newly launched community development mailing list is gradually growing (approx 0.5 posts per day, 20 subscribers). Recent developments have included:

• Launch of Simal project (DOAP catalogue project), March 2007
• Wiki repurposed as a support tool for community development, April 2007
• Switched to a more structured SVN usage for document management, June 2007
• Created a script to facilitate publishing of content, June 2007
• OSS Watch community development mailing list, July 2007
• Started using Google Analytics reports to get a better picture of site use, July 2007
• Simal 0.1 released, August 2007
• Created JISCDevelopment2007 tag (via community dev mailing list), October 2007
• Published first release of project catalogue (using simal), October 2007

MF asked about comparing JISC monitoring report with Google results for our website and RG confirmed that this is currently not done. A recent survey conducted as part of the BCE awareness work put OSS Watch within a point or two of TechWatch in terms of service awareness. Information about readers of the Blog is currently unknown as it is not possible to install plugins on the JISC blog service. PC asked how Spam on the blog is dealt with and RG replied that it is deleted by hand but that JISC is rolling out anti spam measures.

Management can only be summed up as all change! Significant staff events were as follows:

• Sebastian Rahtz left as Director, March 2007
• Mike Fraser started as Director, March 2007
• James Wilson left OSS Watch, April 2007
• Stuart Yeates increased to 1.0FTE, April 2007
• Rowan Wilson increased to 1.0FTE, May 2007
• Randy Metcalfe left, June 2007
• Ross Gardler started as manager, July 2007
• Elena Blanco increased to 0.9FTE, October 2007
• Strategy Meeting with (some of) JISC Executive, October 2007
• Stuart Yeates handed in his notice (last day 11 January 2007), October 2007

• Ross commenced Introductory Certificate in Management, October 2007 Other important management activities related to process and planning were:

• Process - Development of a set of “cascading tables” to guide the evaluation of project outputs, August 2007
• Planning - Full project plan written up to end of project, August 2007
• Planning Meeting with Matthew Dovey and Bill Olivier (approaches to sustainability), August 2007
• Planning - Budgeting to deliver project plan approved by director and programme manager, September 2007
• Planning - OSS Watch Strategy Meeting, September 2007

The National Survey is progressing well and will be complete by 30 March 2008. There has been some concern at JISC over potential respondents suffering survey fatigue so Ramon Casero is liaising with Charles Hutchings at JISC. Important activities relating the survey include:

• Published State of JISC Projects briefing note, August 2007
• Published Automated MTA survey results, October 2007

AB stressed the importance of senior JISC staff being made aware of surveys of JISC projects such as the recent survey on openness. RG will let JISC know about any OSS Watch outputs outside the normal briefing notes.

There followed a substantial discussion on patents seeded by RW’s brief summary of his experiences at the recent Open Invention Network event. Opinions from all sides of the EU patent debate were heard and discussion encompassed (but didn’t always agree on!) the following points:

• although patents are being issued in the EU it lacks a legal framework that allows a patent to be enforced so those patents are in limbo
• recent activity around patent enforceability concerns the idea of destroying patents by challenging using only portions of prior art - the idea is to keep resubmitting challenges with more prior art to keep the patent holder in court until the patent is useless
• JISC has a large corpus of software but it would be difficult to go through this looking for prior art that predates the BlackBoard patent as none of us is patent lawyers and this means it is difficult to determine what is prior art and what is not
• OSS Watch’s position is to watch what is happening with patents rather than to get involved. We can point people at JISC Legal.

TL invited final comments on the Manager’s Report. JN commented that a summary report by purpose rather than activity would be useful and MF suggested following the JISC template and to relate packages against objectives. MF also encouraged RG to include details of OSS Watch’s back end processes in the reports such as the use of vTiger as a Client Relationship Management tool and the use of SVN for document management. AB suggested talking to JISC Infonet as they have materials relating to document management systems.

PC queried whether OSS Watch performs consultations for people involved in procurement. RG reported that we have documents in this area and we are represented at events such as the Institutional Web Management Workshop. We have engaged with the NHS in procuring a knowledge management solution for research outputs but concede that the NHS is neither a JISC project nor an academic institution! There were several suggestions to engage with UCISA in order to reach procurement people.

Business and Community Engagement

RW gave a presentation on Business and Community Engagement during which he reported on the events attended or run by OSS Watch, the institutions that we have had contact with and plans for BCE materials and the creation of a new stakeholder group on the website. OSS Watch has had BCE contact with the following institutions:

• CCLRC (STFC)
• Coventry University
• Keele University
• Kingston University
• Liverpool City of Learning
• MRC Technology
• Queen Mary, University of London
• Royal Holloway, University of London
• The Open University
• University College for the Creative Arts at Farnham
• University of Derby
• University of Leicester
• (University of Limerick)
• University of Oxford
• University of Reading
• University of Southampton
• University of Teesside
• University of Westminster

There was some discussion about problems encountered with supporting these tech transfer units and an acknowledgement that OSS Watch needs to improve its business speak in order to communicate better with this group. JN suggested that where there was more than one group of legal people in institutions (eg in Cambridge they have Research Services and Legal Services with differing levels of legal advice) OSS Watch may benefit from choosing carefully which legal people to engage with.

The JISC BCE study commissioned by Christine Reid prompted further discussion about IPR. RW put forward the idea that IPR management is not an issue restricted to open source and as such we need to ensure that all projects consider this at an early stage. At the end one may choose an open or closed licence but by tracking IPR one is able to make this choice. JN stressed that when dealing with software the economic lifecycle is very short so it is vital to consider licensing and IPR at the beginning of a project not at the end. RG added that it is exactly because commercial potential in software is short lived that long term exploitation is about support, not the software itself.

JN noted that different approaches and conversations were needed in different contexts, for example where the software has commercial potential. Starting the conversation by discussing risk management might have more traction is some situations that starting with a licence discussion. Similarly, in the context of a collaboration to produce software for universities, different arguments again may be required.

MF encouraged more work in looking at other models in use in universities, perhaps with government, and also to look at where OSS Watch can fit with university engagement with small business, perhaps via science parks. TL suggested identifying models for sustainability first and then OSS Watch can see where it fits.

RG reported that Randy Metcalfe has pointed him at an IPR auditing tool for open source software and that OSS Watch would be exploring making such a tool available.

The committee then considered how much software development is really happening in the academic community. RG indicated that there are currently 104 JISC projects producing software outputs and that the newly launched Simal project catalogue will give us information on software development within the JISC space. Simal could be widened outside of JISC projects as it is decentralised. TL suggested making other groups aware of it and to give them the responsibility to drive it within their own space. There was general agreement that OSS Watch is not resourced to scope software development. AB indicated that OSS watch needs to engage with people at a level above software developers perhaps via UCISA.

PC asked how Simal differs from something like Freshmeat. RG explained that while Freshmeat requires that each project goes to Freshmeat to record their information, Simal works by a project maintaining their own descriptor locally and Simal then goes and interrogates that. MF added that Simal is more focused that Freshmeat.

Discussion of Draft Proposal for 2008 onwards

AB introduced the context for the discussion document concerning the future of OSS watch. The immediate goal was to shape the proposal to go before the JIIE committee on 6 November 2007. In its draft form the proposal was too long and more like a progress report. To maximise its effectiveness before the committee it was felt that the proposal should contain diagrams and should highlight areas of current work and other models of engagement.

RG started discussion on the content of the proposal by setting the scene with what OSS watch needs to do to build and support the sustainable communities advocated in JISC’s open source policy. This was followed by an brief exploration of OSS Watch’s main objective to build sustainable communities. In the short term this involves putting a support framework together to support community, in the medium term to capitalize on this by helping some projects become sustainable and in the long term making OSS Watch itself sustainable.

TL suggested referring back to JISC policy within the proposal to highlight that we are addressing these points and JN suggested also referring back to demand from the community. It was generally agreed that the issue of whether OSS Watch’s name should change to reflect its increasingly proactive rather than watching role could be very distracting and thus should be confined to one paragraph in the proposal.

RG very briefly summarised the proposal’s plans for each of the existing workpackages:

Content creation

continuing rigorous quality control processes and commissioning third party authors

BCE engagement

to improve our communication with businesses and to liaise with the output of Simon Whittemore’s work

Conferences

one big conference every two years aligned with the survey plus an increase in the number of workshops

National survey

to remain as is but to tighten relationship with FLOSSPOL survey and to do more automated surveys

Liaising

an increase in liaison with JISC services, other funding bodies, and organisations beyond education

RG then went on to lead discussion on several new areas:

Open development

determining the aspects of open development methodologies that are appropriate to a short term JISC funded project vs long term academic project - this is an extension to what we are doing in project support already

Incubator

modelled on the Apache incubator and born of recognizing that projects don’t have the time to build a community. The incubator will ensure that things are available beyond the life of the project team - eg design docs, code. There is no development inside the incubator, it houses links to documentation, code etc. It is not infrastructure, it is not software development, it is the community development. Should facilitate the re-use of project ouputs later on.

The incubator idea resulted in a great deal of discussion and the committee felt that incubator was a misleading names for the process that Ross described. In response to concerns over funding RG explained that one option would be for OSS Watch to embed a member in the project team to set up the infrastructure that will allow the project to enter the incubator at a later date eg 0.1FTE. Projects would included this resource in their plan. After much discussion there was support for putting the incubator idea forward as an experimental idea that was worth exploring to determine both whether it would work in this context and whether there was demand from the community for the provision of such infrastructure. OSS Watch at this stage cannot be clear about what the incubator would look like and how it would work in practice but OSS Watch felt that there was great merit in piloting various ideas and approaches in order to determine requirements. AB mooted the idea of kite-marking as a way of indicating that a project was ready to enter the incubator but MF felt that kite-marking could easily be mis-interpreted as a mark of software being deployment ready. TL observed that the incubator required a clearly defined set of exit routes.

Registry

in its simplest form the registry would allow anyone to identify communities and find out information about projects. It could become about the people involved with the project and thus help people identify people working in a particular area.

In the ensuing discussion it was recognized that an experimental approach would again be useful in exploring the idea of a registry. By picking projects that we felt could become sustainable, we could take a deeper look through deeper engagement with these projects and show that it works. A portfolio of approaches could be adopted and OSS Watch should not be over-zealous about demanding open development; encouraging ‘open projects’ may be a better approach. It should be linked to other JISC initiatives such as the standards catalogue and CETIS SIGs. It should also show how funding can come in from sources other than JISC so that OSS Watch can support a broader range of projects (outside JISC). The committee noted a dependency on Simon Whittemore’s work and the approach that JISC would take as a result.

Bounty programme

modelled on Google Summer of Code where a student is paid to work on an open source project and the project provides a mentor. This programme would cover projects that are completed in terms of JISC funding and are attracting interest from a third party that has money to “commission” further work. The people involved would receive mentorship from OSS Watch and it would be a way of ticking over projects that are trying to build a community around them.

JN suggested rolling in the idea for a bounty programme with the incubator idea whilst MF suggested rolling it in with seeking funding from sources outside JISC to tie in with sustainability development.

Other discussion concerned whether OSS Watch should become a service or be merged with another JISC service. This would depend on how much longer JISC needed to fund OSS Watch. It was felt that effecting cultural change is a good argument for continued funding for OSS watch. The key ideas of the proposal were identified as open development and BCE which would hopefully lead to JISC projects being higher quality and more sustainable and would also lead to better proposals.

Some ideas on the presentation of report included focusing on where OSS Watch sees itself, what it is asking for, and what are the benefits to JIIE. Sustainability is the key word and needs to be clearly evident and supported by the idea that open development has a causal link to quality and sustainability resulting in better value for money. OSS Watch needs to clearly flag what has been achieved and what work is still needed. RG will circulate a revised draft for comment after a meeting with MF but before 6 November.

AOB

AB reported that she will pass a paper round from the e-Challenges conference in the Hague.

JN reported that the Kuali student project got Mellon funding to the tune of £2.5 million.

Date of next meeting

It was agreed to hold the next meeting towards the end of January 2008, date to be fixed and circulated later.

The meeting was closed at 3.40pm.