1. The WebPA blog
WebPA set up two project blogs as a mechanism to keep the community updated on what was
happening. One blog concentrated on the technical development of the project (the
technical blog) and the other on pedagogic research and the development of framework for
the project (the research blog). The technical blog is a treasure trove for anyone
interested in open development as it provides real life examples of the issues faced by
the project and the practical steps taken to address them. More importantly for OSS Watch
it provides a concrete example of how a JISC funded project can successfully take our
advice and tailor it to their specific case. To illustrate this, consider these blog
excerpts, listed here alongside OSS Watch's specific advice to which they relate.
- I never imagined that choosing the potential licence that we would use could be so
difficult. This is all leading up to the writing of the consortium agreement and the
future open source release of WebPA. 2 January 2007
Advice: Sort out your licence and IPR position early. In an ideal world, the
licence will be decided before the project starts or at least as soon as software
dependencies have been identified.
- We have also managed to get some very basic presentations together as an
introduction to the project…. Our other major mile stone is getting a JISCmail list.
17 January 2007
- The WebPA Project has started to disseminate further afield in ‘DLib’ magazine.
8 February 2007
Advice: Make sure your potential community is aware of you and can communicate
with you from day one; sure they won’t come flocking to your door yet, but creating a
brand is the first step. Simply ensuring that all disseminated materials are identified as
coming from your project goes a long way towards cementing your brand.
- Yesterday we had a very informative meeting with Ross and Rowan from OSS-Watch.
7 March 2007
- All this to do and two open source books to read! 23 March
2007
Advice: Do your research, building a community led project is not hard, but it is
quite different to any other kind of project structure and it won’t happen overnight for
you. Understanding best practice and figuring out how to apply it to your work is the key
to success.
- As with everything related to agreements and IPR, there is a distinct lack of
understanding as to the amount of work that needs to be completed. There is also a
distinct lack of understanding as to why this can be so important to the project and
its potential success. 24 April 2007
Advice: Recognise that you don’t know everything and get advice early. Once you
have got that advice make sure that it is communicated effectively to both the project
team and the community.
- Just to make sure that we are getting our moneys worth out of OSS-Watch (not that
we pay) I asked some colleagues here at Loughborough if they would like to join the
WebPA team for a couple of hours and sit in. Everyone who attended to find out about
Communities has given positive feedback. People have said that they wished they had
been able to give more time to attending the afternoon session, to find out more.
10 May 2007
Advice: Always help those who help you and give credit where it is due.
- It has also highlighted to the WebPA team some of the routes that the project can
take as exit strategies or (a better term) project sustainability from when the
funding runs out. 10 May 2007
Advice: Plan for sustainability as early as is practical. OSS Watch encourages
you to consider it during the bid phase and can help with this. The sooner you start
planning for it the more likely it is to happen.
Sustainability is concerned with the ongoing survival of the project, or the project's
outputs, after the current round of funding. There are many sustainability routes
available to projects including donating all outputs to a suitable parent project,
exploiting the outputs commercially or depositing in appropriate repositories. It is vital
to note that in the case of software it is not sufficient to simply make the
source code available in a "forge" such as SourceForge.
- However, this is now giving me a headache! I have made it overly complicated.
15 May 2007
Advice: Keep it simple. Make it do what users want it to do and nothing more.
Keeping it simple not only helps you, but it also helps anyone coming to the code as a
potential contributor.
- After a fairly swift poll of the project partner and the other potential pilot the
opportunity to use LDAP arose…. The first problem I encountered was… 25 May
2007
Advice: Be open about issues you are facing and how you intend to address them.
By now you have a small audience, someone out there may have the answer, or may stop you
making the wrong decision.
Best practice suggests that issues should be discussed on a mailing list rather than a
blog since the intention should be to encourage contributions of all kinds. People can
only comment on blogs, they can’t create new posts so their contributions are limited to
the topics you choose. However, some community members may be more likley to engage with a
blog post than a mailing list and vice versa so an interesting compromise could be to deal
with a particular issue on the mailing list and then to re-iterate the point with a follow
up blog post. This will maximize exposure within your target audience.
- Who is our community and what exactly will the wiki be used for? 7 June
2007
Advice: Don’t use technology simply because it is “cool”.
- A wiki is not the correct tool for discussion to be carried out on. We have a
mailing list, which anyone can join and the achieves are openly available. Hence the
mailing list is the correct tool and a wiki is an incorrect tool. 7 June
2007
Advice: Use the right tool for the right job.
- In this process we hope to get more institutions to host WebPA for their
academics. From this we hope to build a community of users. 15 June
2007
Advice: Look after your users first; without your users there is no project. From
your users your contributors emerge. Remember that contributions take many forms, it's not
just about code contributions, and contributors may have different roles. Feature
requests, bug reports, bug fixes, and user feedback are all contributions, as is
evangelism and generating attention in the wider community.
- Yesterday I attended a workshop run by OSS-Watch on building communities. For us
as a young open source project it was really useful to get the opinions of the
community that we work within but never really think of as a community! 21 June
2007
Advice: Ask OSS Watch for a consultation!
- This leaves one route to go down, which is to change attitudes. Whether this is
the best course of action only time will tell 21 June 2007
Advice: If current practices are failing and you think you may understand why
speak loud and clear. Don’t be arrogant, don’t tell “them” they are wrong, just lead the
way and those who agree will come and help. Those who don’t agree will challenge you and
will help you ensure that you have considered all options, thus you are more likely to
choose the right path.
- My next delve [into SourceForge] was to set up a list for feature requests and set
up the few other lists for people to use when the project moved forward again. 6
August 2007
Advice: You absolutely must have an infrastructure that allows your community to
engage with you. It doesn’t take long to do and once done it actually makes project
management much easier, even if you don’t have a community yet.
- There are people out there trying to change both the system and the cultures,
mainly thanks to the work of Randy Metcalfe, and now Ross Gardler, and the lads [and
ladies] at OSS-Watch. Due to them I no longer feel isolated as they have set up a
community which is thriving. 14 September 2007
Advice: Where possible engage with existing communities.
- Have we a break through, have I finally stopped talking to my self on the JISCmail
list? 21 September 2007
Advice: Building a community is slow, it can be frustrating, it can be lonely,
but it is worth the effort. Be patient.
- I am in the process at the moment of supporting a number of institutions with
their own installations of WebPA. 8 October 2007
- I released a version of WebPA as a download on Friday 5 October 8 October
2007
- I have in the past twenty four hours been asked about the projects plans to
develop integration modules for a particular VLE. 16 October 2007
- The road map document lets the projects community members see where the project is
intending to go for the next phase of work… In order to ensure that the community
needs are reflected… 22 October 2007
Advice: Understand your users, engage with your users, satisfy your users and
make it easy for users by providing early downloads. Without your users your project will
not be sustainable; the more users you have the more likely you are to find a
sustainability route.
- This leaves me to add the information to the trackers myself. At the moment this
is okay, as there are not too many requests. I am encouraging the users to use the
SourceForge system, so every time I email back with the solution I endeavor to include
tracking information, as well in the hope that at some point they will use the system.
8 October 2007
Advice: As the number of users grows, so will the demands on your support
activities. You must encourage your users to use the proper channels so that the support
load can be spread across the community. This may require a change in behaviour for your
users so aim to support them in adopting processes and procedures that may be new to
them.
Remember users are usually the best people to support other users. The aim is to create a
culture in which users who got free support from you are willing to give free support to
others. Failure to do this means that you will eventually become a victim of your own
success and will never have time to do development work.
- It [drive-by contributions] is a way of building a project where people can
contribute the small element they need to and then leave the project. Unknowingly I
facilitated this type of action 26 October 2007
Advice: Consider third party contributions as just reward for all your hard work
on community development.
To fully understand why these small contributions are important consider this WebPA case.
It was a small bug that would only occur in a specific configuration in the authentication
system so it was unlikely WebPA would find it.
If this bug went unfixed, how many potential users would try to use the software but give
up because they couldn’t log in to their initial installation? Since every user is a
potential contributor, each lost user is potentially a lost contributor. Furthermore, each
lost user could be a lost paying customer for Loughborough or indeed any other entity that
might want to offer a paid product or service based on WebPA. In other words each lost
user results in a decrease in the chances of reaching sustainability.
These small fixes are the lifeblood of an open source project not only because they
ensure a higher number of satisfied users, but also because having had one patch accepted
the contributor is more likely to submit another, then another and another. Eventually you
have a new developer to vote into your project and you are on your way to
sustainability.
- One piece of advice we were given was to make a demonstrator and make it available
to potential users to see what the software is about. Well this was realised at the
end of October. Within this first week we have had a phenomenal response. 1
November 2007
Advice: Make it as easy as possible for users to evaluate your software.
If someone tries an online demo and likes what they see they are far more likely to spend
the time downloading and installing your software. If your software cannot be evaluated
online then create a series of screenshots and/or screencasts (actually they are useful
for software that can be evaulated online too).
2. Does this hard work guarantee sustainability?
WebPA has done an incredible job of building a community support structure around their
code, they are even starting to see genuine community activity.
Will all this effort make the project sustainable? It is far too early to tell. Building
sustainable communities takes a long time. For example, this graph of activity on The Apache Software
Foundation's mailing lists shows that it took around four years before the Apache
community took off.
Although it is too early to say whether WebPA will reach sustainability it is possible to
say this: if the users continue to appreciate the value of this software and the
WebPA team continue to proactively support them in this way the chances of reaching sustainability are very high since
all options are now available.
WebPA is certainly giving itself the best chance possible.
3. Current status?
June 2009: Since the original creation of this document the JISC funding has ended but
the original team remain active. A community now exists with some 17 institutional users
and others are performing evaluations. Early contributions have been provided though code
contributions are slow. Now the team are considering options for the future direction
while the governence model allows participants to influence the decisions which impact
sustainability in this new phase.
December 2009: There is little evidence of activity within the project, however issues
are still entered in the tracker, which indicates that the community continues to use the
tool.
June 2010: The WebPA community mailing list continues to see activity and a WebPA SIG
meeting took place in April 2010.
June 2011: The project mailing list continues to be active, and a few releases were
issued at the end of 2010. The project is now in alpha stage and the current release is
1.0.0.6.
December 2011: As part of the work to integrate WebPA more closely with VLEs, the system
has been used as a case study in the JISC-funded ceLTIc project, which looks at
implementations of the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification. A WebPA
v.2 is currently being prepared to allow LTI integration more easily.
5. Acknowledgements
Our thanks go to Nic Wilkinson of the WebPA project for posting the blog entries around
which this article revolves.
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OSS Watch is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee.