The JISC Virtual Research Environment (VRE) III kick-off meeting was held at the University of Leicester 8-9 July 2009. Representatives from JISC attended as well as representatives from the projects that had won funding in the last JISC VRE III and Information Environments funding round. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/inf11startup.aspx

The highlight of the meeting was certainly the project presentation segment. New project presentations can be a pretty tedious affair, especially when there are 60 new projects, so even if each project had been given 5 minute to strut-their-stuff, it would have taken 5 hours! So rather than torture the audience for 5 hours, the JISC in its wisdom, allowed each project team a mere 30 seconds!

And the 30 seconds were used shrewdly. There were at least 2 rappers, a poet, a juggler, lots of strange re-enactments from the history of advertising, and a man in a really bad shirt and kilt talking up JISC Legal.

A prize was given to the best presenter and heedlessly it went to the juggler. I don’t think he was a good juggler, he could only juggle 3 balls and he should have attempted more. And I can’t even remember what his project was about. I think it had something to do with rapid innovation, or was is Web 2, or repository enhancement, or GPS, or image annotation, or academic paper summarising, or text mining, or research objects, or the access grid, or e-learners, rapid publication, virtual communities, or the growing cases of dementia in Britain. I can’t remember; I think it was about dementia.

After the project presentations there were presentations about the JISC VRE Programme and the JISC’s Information Environment Programme (further explanation on JISC’s web site). The JISC Information Environment is a large and ambitious national computing architecture programme to build a layer of scholarly content, preserve the content, build systems to access it (like VREs), and formulate policies to use it. It is a 3 year programme and many of the projects presented on the day were funded under this programme. I liked this programme a lot; partly because it is about building a shared national vision and consensus in terms of linking repositories and creating standards for repository management. A programme such as this one is vital is the VRE Programmes visions (ie. to create systems for researchers to re-use data and collaborate) are to be met.

One of the most usefuls events of the meeting were the break-out sessions. The break-out sessions were forums to discuss the more practical aspects of the research projects such as project management, communication of results, and evaluation.

Frederick Van Till, the Programme Manager for the VRE Programme proposed an interesting innovation; a ‘critical friend’ to work with VRE projects. The critical friend would act in a similar was to an ‘institutional champion for the project in terms of writing critical articles to assist the outreach and quality of the project. It was an appealing idea; especially considering that it is easy to become so wrapped-up in a project that we forget the larger social content in which we are operating.

Another session was about communicating the project to broader audiences. The advice here was to keep it simple, communicate the project concept in a coherent way, work in collaboration with other projects, plan communication from the very start, make audiences aware of what benefits then from the project (and at what time), and communicate clearly why the project is a unique idea. There are also a number of Web 2 activities that one can use to promote your work to turn passive users into active users who may create and generate content.

The evaluation meeting was concerned with the frameworks used to evaluate projects. As Andy McGregor from JISC explained, there is no perfect evaluation framework as evaluation is not an exact science. Sometimes it is better to assume an outcome and move on rather than try and fit results into a perfect evaluation framework. He stressed the need to evaluate throughout the project and to share successes and problems with others in the Programme. There was a need to communicate the lessons learned as soon as they are found out and incorporate it within the communication strategy.

One point I did heed it to remember the audience. Senior managers often insist on the ‘tyranny of the harder measures’ rather than the ‘societal change’ style of measurement; often furthest away from the concrete and the measurable (I suppose it is possible to be beaten up by a gang from Tuvalu whist reading the latest figures on climate change).

Neil Chue Hong, the Director of OMII-UK, gave a fabulous workshop on user-engagement and made us do all the work. He developed a user-engagement exercise where he spoke frankly about how difficult it was to get users engaged in a project and explained a set of tactics to aid this. They revolved around attracting interest to a project, keeping interest, and getting users to create value. We discussed ways to turn passive-users into active users and the 90-9-1 principle of Participation Inequity (from http://www.useit.com ). Basically only 1% of a site will be creators of content whilst 9% will be active users. The rest will just be in it for the ride (this is also probably reflected in the broader malaise in the British democracy).

A good initiative from JISC and I look forward to seeing how the projects progress