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Hi Amber, folks, This has been a fascinating discussion, and if I haven't commented before it's because I have precisely zero experience of using github. However, having followed the discussion with interest I have to say that I absolutely agree with Pat and Amber, that it's feature sets and how they match the requirements of different workflows that really matters. I've referred to Rachel Heery's reflection on the JISC Repositories and Preseration Programmes many times before, but I'm reminded of it again. At the time she reflected that we had a tendency to focus too much on specific platforms and technology solutions (e.g. repositories, in that particular case) rather than focusing on objectives and what people are actually trying to do. I also wholeheartedly agree with Amber's comment that if people want to share they will find ways to do so, and that we need to understand a of more about individuals' interconnecting workflows. I sometimes think we base too many of our assumptions on hearsay about what users, whether they be teachers, learners or developers, will and will not do, without sufficiently engaging them in the discussion. Cheers Lorna On 3 Jul 2012, at 09:17, Amber THOMAS wrote: Hallo All, I’m pleased and a little scared at the responses I’ve elicited here ... but I am definitely learning! You can tell from my post<http://fragmentsofamber.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/the-git-and-the-pendulum/> that I am not a coder or a github user. I certainly haven’t intended to question the fitness of github’s feature set for its main use cases. My perspective is of having been defining and supporting solutions for the sociotechnical opportunity to share teaching materials. Back when Ian Piper and I were both at Becta we had the Teacher Resource Exchange for schools and Ferl for colleges. As Chris Pegler at the UK OU always stresses, there is a rich history of initiatives to encourage the sharing teaching materials. Some of that has been people claiming to have found The Answer, Over the years, I can remember the following services being suggested as The Model for the sharing of learning materials: mailing lists, forums, VLEs/LMSs, myspace, secondlife, repositories, amazon marketplace, ebay, youtube, facebook, google docs, sourceforge ... I unfairly picked on github for the sake of a pun. (My bad). Pat Lockley’s emphasis on feature sets rather than single service solutions is very helpful. I guess I’m saying that we can learn something from all these services. But none of them alone is The Model. In a previous blog post on web trends<http://fragmentsofamber.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/hunches/> I made a hash of explaining what I mean by orchestration of services, but what I mean really is combining interoperating tools rather than waiting for The Answer. Which is what people actually do anyway. Or as Scott Leslie put in his very resonant post in just share already<http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2008/11/08/just-share-already/>, if people are going to share then they will find ways. It’s the usability within a chain of services that we need to understand better, I think, and that means understanding the total user experience of their workflow distributed between local and remote, public and private, work and social. I could loop off into Visitors and Residents<http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/projects/visitorsandresidents.aspx/> territory but I’ll park that thought. So maybe I’ve fallen victim to my own observed phenomena, for the sake of a pun. I live and learn. : - ) Amber Amber Thomas Programme Manager: digital infrastructure, learning materials, IPR Innovation Group Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) email: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> twitter: @ambrouk mobile: +44 (0) 7920 534 933 website: www.jisc.ac.uk team blog: http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/ -- Lorna M. Campbell JISC CETIS Assistant Director University of Strathclyde Glasgow Email: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Phone: +44141 548 3072 Skype: lorna120768 The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, number SC015263.