A presentation to seed an open discussion held at Victoria University, Melbourne, November 2011

1. Communities, Innovation and Sustainability
The activities of the UKOLN Innovation Support Centre
http://isc.ukoln.ac.uk/
Paul Walk (p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk)

2. introducing the UKOLN ISC

3. the UKOLN Innovation Support Centre (ISC)
• funded by JISC with mixture of ‘core’ and project funding UK Government
Department for Business,
Innovation and Skills
• supporting (technical) innovation in the UK H/FE sectors
• helping HEIs become more innovative
• helping HEIs exploit the JISC innovation
• helping HEIs exploit the innovation of other HEIs Higher Eduction Funding
Council for England
(HEFCE)
• moving from a project-based operation to a more
service-based one
• very interested in sustainability, but narrowing the focus Joint Information Systems
Committee
to continuity as a design goal for the new organisation (JISC)
• a core staff, with extensive use of external consultants
UKOLN Innovation
Support Centre
(UKOLN ISC)

4. core staff (16 and growing)
• ISC Exec • Content & Expertise
• Paul Walk (Director) • Thom Bunting
• Brian Kelly • Talat Chaudhri
• Sally Lewis • Julian Cheal
• Mark Dewey
• Admin • Kora Golub (on maternity leave)
• Ruth Burt • Brian Kelly
• Sarah Hext • Mahendra Mahey
• Jackie Lawton • Rosemary Russell
• Sally Lewis • Adrian Stevenson
• Stephanie Taylor
• Events • Emma Tonkin
• Natasha Bishop • Paul Walk
• Michelle Smith • Richard Waller

5. ISC fundamentals
• priority is to establish:
• service and continuity
• core staff (developing roles and relationships which are relatively
stable)
• taking a longer view than the end of the next project or even
programme
• reliability
• an organisation which is trusted to look after important things
• close JISC programme support
• specific programmes and cross-programme support
• programme design
• a clear understanding of how innovation can and should be supported
in the further and higher education sectors

6. planning, monitoring, reporting

7. areas of work

8. direct programme support
• programme design
• consultation & technical advice
• synthesis of outputs
• examples:
• Discovery - a major resource
discovery effort in the UK based on
aggregating the metadata records of
libraries, museums and archives
• RIM
• euroCRIS Affiliate

9. cross-programme support
• workshops to allow the funder to
reach communities of practice for
consultation
• examples:
• DevCSI
• Metadata Forum
• a forum for those people
supporting eResearch who deal
with metadata management as
part of their duties - a
community of practice

10. horizon scanning & pattern recognition
• JISC Observatory
• observing: listening for the
weak signals from the
communities we work with
• sense-making: looking for
patterns
• synthesising: drawing
conclusions and making
recommendations for
investment
• communicating the results
back to the community

11. evidence gathering
• collecting
evidence of usage
of technologies
and standards
• justifying
investment
• making opaque
rationales more
explicit - “this is
why we
recommend that
you use standard
x”

12. supporting communities practicing innovation
• events, events,
events
• DevCSI -
developers
• Metadata Forum -
practitioners in
metadata
management
• IWMW -
Institutional Web
Managers

13. infrastructure to support innovation

14. incubation
• an idea we are developing as part of the Innovation Zone for the UK
RepositoryNet work
• software which is ahead of its time needs to be looked after and kept alive
before it is more widely adopted
• good software often is developed in advance of large-scale demand
• Apache Foundation offer an interesting model of requirements for incubation
• am very interested in views/ideas/opinions about this

15. advice, synthesis, guidance, reference
• ongoing (mainly technical) advice
and guidance to the JISC and to
those organisations with which the
JISC has a relationship
• synthesis of programme outputs
• help with road-mapping
• dissemination to the wider
community
• Ariadne
• Technical Foundations Website

16. standards
• UKOLN ISC staff represent UK HE sector on several standards bodies/
boards/groups
• so many engagements that I’m reviewing this now
• important examples would include:
• W3C
• International DOI Foundation
• Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
• SWORD
• we also manage external agents - e.g. on the ORCID TAG

17. technical innovation (UKOLN Labs)
• important to retain a
capacity to do
technical innovation
‘in house’
• developed some
tools to aid our
support for people
developing
application profiles
of metadata
standards

18. components, activities and outputs
R&D, Future-looking
Various dev projects
Tech
DC Usage Study
Evidence Innovation
JISC labs.ukoln.ac.uk
Ac. Bookmarks
Gathering & Horizon
Observatory
Scanning Org identifiers
Incubator
ISKB
RDTF RepUK
Technical Technical Infrastructure
Future Repositories SWORD
Advisory Foundations
Standards Bodies OARR
Tech
Foundations
Site
RIM webpages
Metadata Forum
Tech Foundations Advocacy &
Synthesis &
Communities DevCSI
Metadata webpages Reference
Engagement
Web Focus
Briefing papers
Practice, Embedding

19. some observations

20. COP are increasingly important to our innovation
support mission
• where programmes are ultimately directed at institutions, our cross-
programme support has largely evolved into support for communities of
practice
• developers, metadata wranglers, information professionals
• participants from HEIs, public bodies, commercial suppliers

21. direct engagement at all levels
• such communities can make parts of our eResearch ‘ecosystem’ accessible
to our funders
• this kind of activity can give a strategic voice to important constituents who
are not often heard otherwise
• the reverse is also true - funders can more directly reach ‘hidden’
constituents, influencing their world-view & shaping their capabilities

22. working through COP can be a very cost effective
to increase capacity in the sector
• using DevCSI as an example:
• £85K training delivered in 2 days of a ~£60K 4 day event at dev8D
• the COP provides a staff development opportunity for developers which is
attractive to their institutional managers
• the UKOLN ISC’s involvement in the COP support work means that we can
create capacity building opportunities which empower the COP

23. a different emphasis for the UKOLN ISC
from this.... ...to this
Joint Information Systems Joint Information Systems
Committee Committee
(JISC) (JISC)
Funds
Funds
Funds Funds Funds Higher & Further
Education
Institutions
Higher Education
Community
Supports UKOLN ISC UKOLN ISC Supports Commercial
Institution of service provider
Practice or product
vendor
Other public
bodies (e.g.
British Library)

24. some open questions....

25. questions
• engagement with communities of practice is a good way to encourage,
capture and share innovation
• but is it sustainable?
• how far should funders go in directly sustaining communities of practice?
• governance, measuring impact, demonstrating ROI?
• can we benefit from international collaboration to support COP?
• when should we seek:
• to embed into institutions?
• to invest in national centres?
• to allow a community of practice to ‘take ownership’?