OSS Watch Advisory Committee Meeting Minutes, 25 June 2010

by Gabriel Hanganu on 28 January 2011

Introduction

Attending

  • Advisory Committee members: Matthew Dovey (chair), David Flanders, Ross Gardler, Gabriel Hanganu, Steve Loughran, John Norman, Stormy Peters, Jo Shields, Paul Walk, Scott Wilson
  • Invited participants: Miles Berry, Andrew Katz, Samuel Klein, Simon Phipps

Agenda

  • Update on OSS Watch activity
  • Discuss future collaboration opportunities
  • Agree on immediate actions
  • AOB

Meeting notes

RG provided an overview of OSS Watch’s recent activity and funding situation. The main challenge consists of maintaining the remit and high standard of the service while identifying new revenue streams in addition to JISC funding. OSS Watch was asked to cut budget and managed to do it without cutting staff. Engagement with the business sector was mainly addressed in the successful OSS Watch conference (TransferSummit), which gathered high calibre speakers and delegates from industry, academia and 3rd sector. In the next months OSS Watch needs to identify the main areas the service should focus on.

RG invited the committee to suggest what these main areas should be, and what other collaboration opportunities should be taken into consideration.

The participants suggested a number of public and private areas that could be explored as potential revenue streams:

  • Procurement: a lot of effort is currently spent by universities on procurement issues, including making sure that open source solutions are considered. There is a lot of open source interest in the libraries sector at the moment. An OSS Watch subscription model would allow some funds to be allocated from universities for this.
  • University IT strategy and business models: IT strategy is one of the main concerns of UCISA members. Cambridge is writing a new IT strategy which can be a model for other universities, OSS Watch could help shape this. Some support may be sought from UCISA. Writing open source business models for universities could also be a useful service. The service would be more useful if targeted to clusters of 7-10 partners rather than all UK universities.
  • Education materials: One of OSI’s focus is open source educational materials. OSS Watch can contribute to these materials with support from IBM, Google and others interested in having these materials published
  • Training: Digital literacy will be key for schools and undergraduate education. Open development is part of the digital literacy knowledge and materials will be necessary to help build the curriculum. Businesses also need to train their staff in open source, there is a gap between what students learn and what they actually need at work. Business and public sector staff need distributed team skills. There is growing demand for training both learners and future trainers in open development. Computing departments are already collaborating with businesses in this area. The government encourages distributed learning and study from home. In universities there is also need to train researchers on how to engage with open source projects and on software sustainability. Gnome and other software foundations can connect OSS Watch with businesses with whom they collaborate on training.
  • JISC funding: OSS Watch is encouraged to look for funding beyond JISC. JISC will try to provide backbone funding but OSS Watch should identify alternative revenue streams. It would be useful if OSS Watch prepared a set of costed services that could be commissioned individually. As long as these packages continue to provide unbiased support and remain within OSS Watch’s remit, they can take any convenient format. One envisaged model for open development support beyond 2011 involves JISC Advance as the main port of call for generic support, and OSS Watch as a paid service taking the more complex queries and bespoke support.
  • Collaboration with Cetis and UKOLN: there are opportunities for collaborating on events and training. The three services should think of a joint approach to getting sponsorship for these events from the industry.

ACTIONS

  • OSS Watch to explore the university subscription model as an alternative funding source
  • OSS Watch to consider how open development could contribute to shaping university IT strategy/ business models
  • OSS Watch to explore the idea of packaging open development educational materials using corporate funding
  • OSS Watch to identify areas where existing OSS Watch published material could be re-used as training events
  • OSS Watch to prepare costed support packages that could be individually commissioned by JISC and other partners
  • OSS Watch to explore opportunities for coordinated open innovation activity with UKOLN and Cetis

Next meeting

November 2010, TBC