(Please note I am now subbed from my personal email address, so I can
comment with added Winston)

Bid 1 - "that collection managers deem to be important" - that worries
me a little, as collection managers are often hamstrung by what their
system can do. I've got a half side project with two repository
managers / support staff looking at an ideal feature wish list. One of
the key things that's come up (and I share for free) is whether
content will work on a mobile device / level of supported platform
independence  (and if not, is there an alternative piece - i.e.
content negotiation and then, possibly, controlled content
degradation). There is no support for this in either of the system's
they use at present.

So if I start with the metadata these collection managers present,
that does not seem equal to "deem to be important".

Bid 2 - Wonder if going to / stopping at search logs in enough.
Searched then visited, searched then tweeted. Not all repos have
enough content to merit a search facility?

Be interesting to know which repositories had agreed to share for bid 2?

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Sarah Currier <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> Friday is looming: the deadline for sharing our proposals for the 3 JISC OER
> technical mini-projects. I've been wondering how others are approaching
> this. I'm facing this innovative open approach to bidding with some
> trepidation- for me, it's my livelihood, so it seems counter-intuitive to
> put ideas out there where the people I might be be competing with for
> funding can see them. A tension that echoes right across the open education
> domain I guess.
>
> On the other hand, mini projects (1) and (2) are so dear to my heart that I
> can't but press forward! To me the intent behind them represents the
> culmination of work that many of us have been trying to do for some years
> now. Well, it's a culmination and, I hope, the start of a new, more
> productive level of research in this area. If *someone* does it and does it
> well, I'll be very happy even if I'm momentarily grumpy that it's not me!
>
> I am talking with another independent consultant, Dr. Ian Piper at Tellura,
> about possible approaches to all 3 mini-projects. Ian and I have been
> working together for the past year (and Ian was around a lot longer than
> that) on a large-scale schools-level initiative developing 10s of 1000s of
> openly available resources for teachers.
>
> We are both very keen on building on that project's work in open
> vocabularies; quality assurance for metadata; and content and metadata
> frameworks that are linked data- and Semantic Web-friendly.
>
> Ian's history is (among other things) within the English schools and FE
> sector, while I've been involved for some years in HE educational metadata,
> as well as being involved in the Dublin Core Education Community. In DC-Ed
> we tried gathering use cases to see what folk were doing with educational
> metadata on the ground (not just OER use cases), but it was clear to me then
> that a larger-scale survey like mini-project (1) would be useful.
>
> I know Ian has a great idea for the 3rd, open mini-project: to further
> develop his openvocabs tools: http://openvocabs.org/ - in order to ensure
> they meet the requirements of those developing and working with OERs. (Ian
> is at a meeting today so he agreed I could mention him in passing- he's on
> this list and will be able to answer questions himself). However, we're both
> sure that there will be a bunch of excellent ideas and tools coming forward
> for the 3rd mini-project.
>
> For me, I am keen on the first 2 mini-projects, and Ian has the technical
> tools and expertise to help me with that side of those (I'm the semantic
> analysis person). On the other hand, there could be someone out there
> planning an excellent approach to the first 2 projects, and it would be more
> feasible for me to collaborate with them, if needed?
>
> Anyway, I just thought it would be an idea to put this out there and see
> what comes back. Is everyone else preparing perfectly formed bids that they
> are going to post on this list on Friday? Is anyone looking for a
> collaborator or two? Or is everyone thinking "I hope someone else will bid
> for this because this work needs doing?".
>
> In any case, I look forward to discussion on this over the next couple of
> weeks once proposals are in.
>
> Best wishes,
> Sarah
> --
> Sarah Currier
>
> Sarah Currier Consultancy Ltd.
> EdTech | Resource Sharing | Web 2.0 | Metadata | Repositories
>
> w: http://www.sarahcurrier.com/
> e: [log in to unmask]
> t: +44 (0)7980855801
>
> LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/sarahcurrier
> Skype: morageyrie
>
> ________________________________