And so the IWMW 2009 blog was born…

We hope the blog has been useful to you and you’ve found the posts both stimulating and informative.

From today we don’t intend to provide any more significant posts on the blog. The blog will remain here as a resource for you to use and comments will remain open (for the time being).  In the future we may consider archiving of the blog.

If you have any comments on the content or structure of the blog please do let us know/post them up.

We’ll hopefully see you all at next year’s event!

General

• Kevin Mears – My thoughts on IWMW2009
• Anthony Doherty – Last day at IWMW 2009
• Andrew Male – Three actions
• Liz Ayan -  Iwmw2009 Introduction And Keynote Speech Overview

Parallel Sessions

• Andy Powell – The management of website content in UK universities – report available
• Brian Kelly -  Are University Web Teams Too Large?

Remote Participants

• Nick Skelton – A domain driven design for the University Web

Technologies

• Marieke Guy – Splendid Streaming at IWMW
• Brian Kelly – An Archive Of IWMW 2009 Tweets

• http://vimeo.com/5976384
• http://vimeo.com/5976404
• http://vimeo.com/5976472

Their aim was to make URIs human readable, hackable and, most importantly, persistent.  To this end, they begin their design process with the domain objects (programmes, songs, recordings etc) and build models based on how these domain objects relate to each other.  They do not use wireframes or mockups, but do take the domain model to users to check that they are speaking the same, ubiquitous language.  They then translate the domain model into a physical database schema that enables them to richly express the domain model in the language of the user.

Once the model is established as a database schema, it is a case of collecting together all the data needed to create the resource in all of its forms, before moving on to document design.  One of the most poignant points made for some of the delegates I spoke to afterwards was the assertion that document design should be independent of the page layout – as that’s the job of the CSS.  In fact, wireframing doesn’t happen until they add the layout CSS to the HTML pages and any Javascript or AJAX gets added last of all.  Michael and Matthew were very firm that they don’t test photoshop mock ups or wireframes, they test working applications, which enables them to focus more on creating rich content discovery journeys through the resources that are domain driven.

We were given a tour of bbc.co.uk/programmes to see all this in practice and the opportunity to ask Matthew and Michael about their processes in more detail.

As I described on the UK Web Focus blog these tags appeared to be well-used, with over 34% of the tweets containing the event tag (#iwmw2009) and an additional tag.

Twitter search engines, such as Tweetzi, Twazzup and Twitter Search, can now be used to find tweets related to a particular talk or parallel session.  As an example you can view the tweets for:

• Derek Law’s opening plenary talk on  Headlights on Dark Roads (P1) using Tweetzi, Twazzup or Twitter Search
• The Mashups Round the Edges workshop session by Mike Ellis and Tony Hirst (A8) using Tweetzi, Twazzup or Twitter Search

We have updated pages on the IWMW 2009 Web site so that the details of the plenary talks and workshop sessions contain links to these three Twitter search tools. We hope that this will help the speakers and facilitators to get an idea of what the audience was thinking.  We hope the findings aren’t too shocking

Chris argued that it is a waste of time and resources to have humans doing jobs that computers can do really well.  To this end, his department has written lots of scripts to perform basic tasks – particularly monitoring tasks – to help make them more visibly more efficient.

Whilst monitoring their department’s systems in this way has made it easier to manage their workload – preventing them from dropping the ball on normal requests in favour of crashing in to the rescue when something unexpectedly breaks – Chris had also noted that this practice was going to be especially important in the current economic climate, when we are all facing uncertainty about our jobs.

Monitoring is enabling them to build a stock of statistics and graphs that show how much work they do for the department they support, and how efficiently they work.  He was concerned by the amount of data people in similar roles in other institutions could be throwing away and argued strongly that they should start preserving that data – even if they don’t do anything analytical with it initially.  He also recommended monitoring the things beyond your control that cause your systems to become unavailable.

Throughout, Chris kept returning to the point that we are here to facilitate research and teaching.  Building a Batcomputer can help you focus on this task and allow you to better enable your researchers and students, rather than rushing round trying to be Superman.

General

• Steve Jordan – IWMW 2009 – Steve’s reflections
• Martin Poulter and team – IWMW reflections/ Hug a Developer
• Liz Azyan (Jadu) – Iwmw2009: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly…

Parallel Sessions

• Andy Ramsden – Reflections on QR Code workshop at the IWMW 2009
• Andy Powell – Care in the community
• Janet McKnight – Geolocating ducks in Essex
• Tony Hirst – IWMW Mashups Round the Edges: Scraping Tables and IWMW Mashups Round the Edges: YQL, Microformats and Structured Data
• Mike Richwalsky – IWMW Amazon Web Services Session
• Andrew Male – Using Scrum: Sprints not Marathons

Remote Participants

• Karine Joly – Get a taste of the Institutional Web Management Workshop held in the UK from your desk

Technologies

• Marieke Guy – Tweetastic at IWMW2009
• Brian Kelly – Evidence on Use of Twitter for Live Blogging and Event Amplification at IWMW 2009

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Whilst at IWMW last week, I noticed that a web application I wanted to demo didn’t work on the IE6 default browser on the local Essex machines. Bearing in mind that many developers on programmes such as the JISC Rapid Innovation strand (#jiscri) are likely to make use of frameworks and libraries that exploit the power of current generation browsers (IE7, FF 2.*) and assume standards compliance, the assumption that support for IE6 will not be required is one that many developers may take, either explicitly or implicitly (e.g. as result of developers not using machines that run IE6).

That is, for rapid innovation and development to work, developers are likely to use contemporary tools. But there’s a problem – if JISC are funding the development of tools and apps for use in HE, they need to run on the installed base of web browsers – hence the poll. If a lot of HEIs are running IE6, and a lot of HE staff use IE6 as their browser, developers creating apps for use by staff are going to have to check that their apps run on IE6. For some, this is going to be non-trivial and time spent tryijng to support IE6 will make the projects non-viable.

Maybe JISC needs to start innovating on behalf on the HE community, and finding ways of putting pressure on HEIs so that they adopt browsers that can run apps developed rapidly for modern browsers? Maybe in some programme strands, JISC needs to tell the HE community that they are holding (rapid) innovation back by not adopting current browsers? IMHO, of course…

Why not have a go at the survey.

Tony Hirst, Open University

Have a go

We’re always asking you what you’re going to differently after you get home from IWMW. We don’t want you to just feel inspired and fired up, we want you to use what you’ve learnt to change the way you work.

In a very impressive example of speedy action Chris Gutteridge is having a go at organising a Southampton Developers Group. The short-term plan is for local developers to meet up for a drink, long-term he’d like to have a go at a hack day.

Chris says….

I’ve been waiting for years for somebody to set up a developers social group in Southampton. The session on the last day really rubbed in the fact that (a) it would be easy and (b) I should just sodding do it myself.

So I’ve set up a google group, a hashtag #sodev, put the word out on twitter.

I’ve spoken to a pub who can provide wifi etc. Biggest worry there is how to provide some power leads without trip hazards.

I’m now slightly worried that it could be too popular… In Southampton area we’ve got 2 universities, the SpecSavers developers, IBMers, Roke Manor Research, and the Ordinance Survey just off the top of my head.

I used google groups as a feel some developers may have a bit of hatred for being in facebook groups. I’ll see what community I get and what they want. I suspect that people will want to have a facebook group to get event invites (facebook’s actually useful bit).

If you are interested in joining up with Chris sign on to the Google group.

For further details contact:

Naomi Pettitt
Account Manager
Siteimprove Ltd.
naomi.pettitt@siteimprove.co.uk
+44 (0)845 226 8050