Actually…

We’re very pleased to announce that JISC have agreed to fund JISCPress, a six-month, £32,500 project led by the University of Lincoln, in partnership with the Open University and based on WriteToReply. JISCPress will provide a scalable community platform for publishing and discussing project calls and final reports, in order to support the grant bidding and project dissemination processes.

As you may know, WriteToReply is run in our spare time – lots of late nights and busy lunchtimes. Since launching the re-publication of the Digital Britain – Interim Report, we’ve been looking for ways to bring benefits from our work on WriteToReply, into the Higher Education community where we work. JISC fund much of the UK development and innovation in the use of ICT in teaching and research and in March, announced their Rapid Innovations funding call.

We quickly re-published the call on WriteToReply to demonstrate the benefits of publishing funding calls in this way and then went on to submit a bid which proposed a community platform for the JISC funding call process, based on our experience of setting up and running WriteToReply. As with WriteToReply, this will be an open, public project and all documentation and code will be available under open licenses.

JISCPress is a platform aimed at people working in UK Higher Education, but the platform itself could be easily adapted for other uses, just as WriteToReply is primarily focused on government consultation documents. The final platform will be available as an Amazon Machine Image so anyone will be able to host their own multi-document discussion platform with all the benefits you see on WriteToReply plus the additional features we’ll be developing throughout this project. We’re already advocating the use the platform in our own universities for the open (and closed) discussion of institutional strategies, for the critique of texts by students and for peer-review of research papers. What might you use it for?

Over on the JISCPress project blog, you’ll find links to a mailing list, wiki and code repository. Feel free to join us if this WriteToReply spin-off appeals to you. If you know anyone that might be interested, please do let them know.

You’re probably already aware that WriteToReply uses WordPress Multi-User and CommentPress. Eddie Tejeda, the developer of CommentPress will be working with us on the project and this will result in significant further development of CommentPress 2. So, if you’re interested in WPMU and CommentPress (as many people are), please consider following, contributing to and testing JISCPress.

We should also note that while the project is a spin-off of our work on WriteToReply, neither Tony or Joss are personally receiving any funds from JISC.  The contributions from JISC to cover our time on this project are paid directly to our employers and does not result in any financial benefit to us or WriteToReply (which is in the process of being formalised as a non-profit business).  In other words, while WriteToReply is a personal project, JISCPress is part of our normal work as employees of our universities (both Tony and I are expected to routinely bid and win project funds – you get used to it after a while!). Money has been allocated to fund dedicated developer time to the project, which will pay Eddie and Alex, a student at the University of Lincoln, for their work as freelancers.

Anyway, on with the project! Here’s the outline from our original bid document:

This project will deliver a demonstrator prototype publishing platform for the JISC funding call and dissemination process. It will seek to show how WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) can be used as an effective document authoring, publishing, discussion and syndication platform for JISC’s funding calls and final project reports, and demonstrate how the cumulative effect of publishing this way will lead to an improved platform for the discovery and dissemination of grant-related information and project outputs. In so doing, we hope to provide a means by which JISC project investigators can more effectively discover, and hence build on, related JISC projects. In general, the project will seek to promote openness and collaboration from the point of bid announcements onwards.

The proposed platform is inspired and informed by WriteToReply, a service developed by the principle project staff (Joss Winn and Tony Hirst) in Spring 2009 which re-publishes consultation documents for public comment and allows anyone to re-publish a document for comment by their target community. In our view, this model of publishing meets many of the intended benefits and deliverables of the Rapid Innovation call and Information Environment Programme. The project will exploit well understood and popular open source technologies to implement an alternative infrastructure that enables new processes of funding-related content creation, improves communication around funding calls and enables web-centric methods of dissemination and content re-use. The platform will be extensible and could therefore be the object of further future development by the HE developer community through the creation of plugins that provide desired functionality in the future.

Subject to user requirements, our planned project deliverables are:

• A WordPress Multi-User based platform for authoring and publishing JISC funding calls in a form that allows paragraph-level comment and discussion either locally or remotely.
• A meta-site that aggregates all document data into a single site for search, navigation by categories and tags and can syndicate searches, tags and categories.
• Develop CommentPress to meet WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines, meeting public sector requirements.
• Evaluation and integration of “related content” utilities to dynamically link related project calls and reports based on content and/or semantic analysis.
• Evaluation and possible integration of remote, realtime messaging services such as Twitter and XMPP integration.
• Evaluation and possible integration of enterprise authentication services such as LDAP and Shibboleth.
• Evaluation and possible integration of OpenCalais, a semantic tagging service.
• Documentation on how to exploit the benefits of AWS and clone the project instance for other uses.
• A documented suggested workflow for document authors
• Documented examples of how to fully exploit the platform for data extraction and syndication.
• Documented ‘user stories’ for the JISC funding call process.

If this sounds interesting, please do take a look at the full project proposal and join us on the mailing list.

Sam Carson from CarsonsPost.com explains why he and others re-published the Draft Order to Implement the Carbon Reduction Commitment on Write to Reply, and why he thinks this consultation is important to examine, discuss and reply to.

The Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) is an unusual document to put up in the public space and ask for response. It does not affect people directly, or even small business. In fact, only relatively large organisations will be directly affected by it. In this way it doesn’t really lend itself to activism, or invite controversy. So why is the Draft Order to Implement the Carbon Reduction Commitment on Write to Reply? The CRC is an important and innovative way of getting business to address their contribution to climate change, but no other programme like it exists. Therefore, it is important to understand what it is, how it will work, and how businesses will cope. Most of all, it is crucial that the potential issues and problems with the CRC are understood and acted upon, so that the exercise is successful in fulfilling its aims.

What is the Carbon Reduction Commitment? The CRC will be a capped emissions trading market. The CRC is not a tax, and for most businesses it will have little cost and potentially some revenue generation. Only the poorest performing companies will be penalised – as they are already in the extra, surplus energy cost they incur by not investing in energy efficiencies. The CRC will require extra resources for companies to administer the extra reporting requirements, as they would have if the extra emissions reporting elements had not been dropped from the Climate Change Act (2008). A case can be made that these reporting elements were dropped because of the CRC.

A mandatory carbon emissions trading scheme of this scale has yet to be adopted anywhere in the world. However, there are similar schemes in development in Australia and North America – including proposals in the US. The EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) is similar, and the credit markets will be linked, but does not have same scope. The EU-ETS only covers large-scale combustion (like large coal power plants or refineries) where the CRC covers electricity consumption as well as combustion (except transportation).

It is creating a market out of “thin air”, but that isn’t to say that emissions markets are not proven. For example, the US Acid Rain Program of the early 1990s successfully reduced Sulphur Dioxide through the use of emissions trading. However, once again the scale is not as purvasive as the CRC intends to be.

The challange is clear, it is a large and innovative programme. It has complexity, and therefore there is the potential for implementation to be confused and poorly communicated. Unfortunately, this appears to be the case so far.

For example: qualification for inclusion is based on who pays the electricity bill. Initially this seems like a simple and practical approach, but it does not understand all the complexities between landlord and tenant and managing agent that are possible in the UK. Many issues that will arise out of the rental arrangements of large buildings could have been mitigated with better communication between the government and potential participants, but to date plans and timelines have been confusing and difficult to understand.

This is the reason to post the draft implimentation document on Write to Reply. It is important be able to discuss the draft, section by section. More people need to think about how the CRC will impact their business. More questions need to be asked, by a larger range of people. The CRC can be a successful programme, but only if it is properly developed and understood. If the original documents are held up to as many people as possible, and the question asked:

How do we make it work?