Christopher Brown’s Blog

I was asked to sit on the Panel Session at the recent JISC Leaping Hurdles: Planning IT Provision for Researchers event in London on 18 June 2009 (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/06/leapinghurdleslondon.aspx). This event gave the opportunity for the JISC-sponsored Community Engagement projects to feed back some of their findings and to stimulate debate. The day started with presentations from the three Community Engagement projects eIUS, e-Uptake and ENGAGE and was followed by VRE projects, myExperiment, VERA, SDM VRE and CREW. There was a lot of useful discussion in the breakout sessions where barriers, and how these barriers might be solved, were discussed and then reported back to delegates.

The final part of the event consisted of the Panel Session where each member of the panel was asked the following question, “Who plans IT provision for researchers?”. The following is an extended version to the answer I gave during the session:

“One must remember that providing an e-infrastructure provides tangible benefits to the researcher – it speeds up their research, results are produced quicker, faster time to publication, an enabler for collaboration. The researchers benefits, the department benefits and the institution benefits. By funding researchers and giving them the e-infrastructure they need the institution benefits indirectly and this is something that needs to be realised so that it influences institutional planning.”

“The planning should be done at a national, institutional and research team level but they need to work together with an overall direction led at a national level.”

“Planning at the Institutional level must ensure researchers are served by the latest technology, realise the importance of research data and its value and ensure it is archived and accessible, ensure they are served adequately by their network and HPC clusters. They must give their researchers the support they need.”

“The funding bodies (research councils and the JISC) need to provide the required e-infrastructure but they also need to provide the help and support to use this e-infrastructure efficiently, to help join up communities and encourage collaboration, provide examples of best practice, identify successful projects and show how to overcome barriers.”

“Funding projects like the Community Engagement projects must influence institutional planning and not just national planning. There is no point having a national plan if there is no institutional plan, otherwise it’ll just cause barriers at an institutional level.”

Last week I attended the successful and hugely popular JISC Conference (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/03/jiscconference09.aspx). Yes I know I work for JISC so I would say that, but even before I joined JISC I was always impressed by the quality of their conferences, stands and their whole approach to marketing and communications. What I particular like about the JISC conference is the way the live feed opens up the event to everyone. Wouldn’t it be great if more conferences could do this? I am all for enablers and open access and this event was a perfect example. The JISC Events Blog (http://events.jiscinvolve.org/category/jisc09/) also allowed people to participate and give feedback to each part of the event.

The thing that struck me most about this year was how Twitter can be used as an efficient communication tool. This was particularly evident in James Farnhill and Lawrie Phipps’ “As You Like Identity” session (http://events.jiscinvolve.org/session-as-you-like-identity/) where not only were the audience Tweeting during the session but people who weren’t there were answering these Tweets. This session broke from the traditional format of having a number of presenters and was more of an interactive session which encouraged audience participation. With the live feed of keynotes and some sessions anyone tagging their Tweets with the tag JISC09 could get involved interactively even if they weren’t physically at the event. It didn’t just end when the event closed as people are still Tweeting and even if you don’t use Twitter you can read these on the main conference page (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/03/jiscconference09.aspx).

As well as the sessions, the exhibition and the opportunity to network both the opening and closing sessions were excellent and thought provoking. I would recommend listening (or watching once the videos are online) to both of these if you get the chance. And to continue my Twitter theme, as Ewan McIntosh said in his closing keynote to the audience, if you’re not Twittering you are just watching, you are not involved. That might have alienated 95% of the audience but hopefully it has encouraged more people to get involved. A comment made to me at the end of the event was that the conference was great for coming up with ideas, but what happens after the event to move these forward. I would suggest that the Blog and the Twittering are key enablers in making this happen.