Skills day: Matt Jukes, JISC: Why Web 2.0
Matt Jukes describes the tools he’s been working on, from blogs to wikis.
You can download the slides that accompanied Matt’s talk on the skills day wiki
Tools I’ve been working on:
Jiscinvolve.org - in tests for a while using early version of Wordpress Multi-user but have now moved on with a stable version, 70+ themes, 50+ plug ins so that people can do various things with YouTube, tags etc. Got nightly back-ups, lots of storage, it’s hosted alongside Bristol uni. Curently working to add fedrated access management (common usernames and passwords). We’re also working on spam amanagement
wiki.jisc.ac.uk - wikis built on Confluence, an enterprise wiki so can private and public wikis. Includes large collection of plug-ins and macros, ability to personalise themes, 24/7 SLA
jiscanswers.org - really beta stage, a bit like Yahoo answers, will be ready for limited launch in October - based on idea that difficult to know who to ask what at JISC so the aim for this is that people will put questions and people from the communtiy can answer the,. JISC members of staff can be flagged as ‘experts’. Beta site here:
http://involve.jisc.ac.uk:9000/jisc/site/
Queries to Matt: m.jukes@jisc.ac.uk, m.jukes@gmail.com, Skype: matthewdavidjukes
Questions
Question: what’s reputation management?
Matt: The way the Q+A works is have 10-day window to answer then person who asks the question chooses the best. The person who answered gets a star and the more stars they get the more they work up to the status of expert. JISC staff and services start off as experts. Based around community idea that some will become more enagaged than others. Still in early stage - still working out how exactly it will work with JISC Services.
Question: what are you using Wordpress for?
Matt: To build a blog platform - anyone who wants one can go top jisc.involve.org and build one. Needed to prove a concept. If it works then will find a way that it can be taken on so that it’s not just me running it. Pendulum has moved from wikis to blogs and back to wikis
Just open to services and staff and people we pay their wages at the moment.
Question: What licences are used on the wikis for the content?
Matt: people running the wikis can choose for themselves
Question: hackers interface for wordpress and confluence, to adapt plug ins?
Matt: on Confluence is harder but possible on Wordpress, and we will give details on a forum for how to build WP plugins. Confluence is somewhere between commercial and open source technology but it’s more complicated. Hard to work out a way to test them without affecting the whole platform.
Q: with Wordpress why create separate support forum - why not share it wider as part of open source spirit?
Matt: it’s mainly for the plug-ins, for people to say “we want one, add it”, such as Ultimate Tag Warrior - if they want it added then the easiest way is for people to say so through a forum and for people to support it as I can’t respond to every individual request
Q: OSSWatch are there to make sure we keep involved in the wider community - we will help you to do that
Dicky: JANET also looking at a national platform, currently going through a beta stage and aimed at schools. Came out of the JANET video-conferencing scheme.
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