Hi Scottish Web Folk
Do institutions have public developer websites? I seem to remember that Abertay had some publicly-viewable (and quite interesting) demos and proofs of concept at:
<http://development.abertay.ac.uk/>
I was wondering if this might be more likely after regionalization.
Here's a use case scenario explain how they might be used:
Scenario 1: Citation generator
==============================
A member of staff draws attention to new guidelines for referencing film and audio:
<http://bufvc.ac.uk/projects-research/sharedservices/avcitation/guidelines>
On inspection, an online tool to generate citations might be helpful. A web search returns no specific matches for BUFVC guidelines, but does find a similar tool:
<http://www.cynthiaclarke.com/citationgenerator/citation.html>
It occurs to a developer studying HTML5 that this might be a neat project to learn-by-doing the new form elements/attributes. A proof of concept could be quickly knocked together and published, explained by a blog post. Further refinements of the prototype into a prototype would subsequently published (all under an open source licence) and documented. The code/application/documentation would be public, allowing indexing by search engines.
Scenario ends
=============
OK, this scenario might not be exactly what would happen (for example, an email enquiry to BUFVC might be in order), but this might be something we are missing as a sector.
Or, a central sector development resource could be used. Perhaps a development equivalent of Re:Source <http://www.resourceshare.ac.uk/>.
Alternatively, perhaps for more serious software, existing online code repositories could be used (although the documentation might still be found on developer blogs on institutional sites).
At the moment, we do not seem to have an open licence policy at our institution.
I have made some suggestions to my manager and she asked me to produce a business case for a public website (post-regionalization-merger) for demos, proofs of concept, working prototypes and so forth with shareable code.
Any thoughts?
Tavis Reddick
ICT Systems Development
Adam Smith College
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