Good APIs Project

On Monday the Good APIs project team headed down to the JISC Developer Happiness Days (dev8d) launch at Birkbeck, University of London.

This 5 day event is JISC’s attempt at getting a lot of educational software developers together to pool ideas and take part in a developer decathlon: a two-day team coding session with prizes for the best code.

On the Monday night there was a kick-off party where Dave Flaunders explained the decathalon rules and what the event was all about. There was then a TechTalkShow hosted by Paul Walk which was a debate forum for relevant issues.

After a good social outing in the many of us headed back to our accommodation. JISC offered free beds for developers at the Palmers Lodge hostel.

In the morning there were a number of lightening talks on coding methods before the launch of the decathlon.

During our time at dev8d  the Good APIs team managed to have some really useful chats with people about where they want software development to go in the education world, and how they feel JISC could help take them there. Most were very excited to have been given the opportunity to spend such a big chunk of time ” just making stuff” and realise that JISC is keen to put money into this area.

There are lots of great resources from dev8d including some really interesting five minute interviews on the blog.

• Twitter channel – http://twitter.com/dev8D
• Web site – http://www.dev8d.org/
• blog – http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/
• wiki – http://code.google.com/p/developerhappinessdays/

Mia Ridge from the Science Museum and Tony Hirst from the Open University have both mentioned the GOOD APIs survey on their blogs:

• Ouseful.info
• Open Objects

In his post Tony also mentions the JISC Developer Happiness Days (9-13 February 2009, London). The Good APIs fully intends to have a presence at this event, possibly on the Community gatherings day (Thursday 12 February).

This is a “day of community activities based around specific software types, bringing everyone back into the systems they work with on a day-to-day basis. Pitch ideas to your fellow community members and take the opportunity to drop in on a different community session as well“.

At the moment the JISC Developer Happiness team are offereing free beds to novice developers who wouldn’t normally get funding to attend the event. Take a look!

Good APIs project went along to the Mashed Libraries 2008 event on the 27th November 2008 at Birkbeck College, London. This event was an attempt to get HE/FE library developers together and trying out new things. It was conceived by Owen Stephens of Imperial College and sponsored by UKOLN.

A number of photos are available on Flickr and several blog posts have already been written about the day.

• Paul Walk
• Andy McGregor
• Jo Alcock
• Clari Hunt
• Richard Wallis (Panlibus)
• Tony Hirst
• Edith Speller
• Chris Keene
• Paul Stainthorp (also see Paul’s live blog from the day)
• Owen Stephens

The Ning network is also still available

Good APIs project was represented at the recent CETIS Conference 2008 when Brian Kelly and Marieke Guy co-facilitated a half-day session on Innovation in a World on Web APIs.

The session was run as an unconference and attendees were encouraged to contribute.

In the first part of the session people were asked to talk about what they are currently working on:

• Ian Ibbotson talked about the SWORD API
• Tony Hirst gave a live constructed on the fly a prototype using Google Spreadsheets to harvest data contained in a table in a Wikipedia page (lists of cities in the UK), fed this into a Yahoo Pipe (Geo locate cities and create an RSS feed) and then fed this into Google Maps.
• Sam Easterby-Smith demonstrated PROD – a directory and monitoring tool for JISC funded projects.
• John Kleeman showed Questionmark’s SOAP API

After coffee the second part of the session was spent looking at the future. This also involved exploring best practices for Web APIs.

Feedback from the session is available from the session wiki. Further resources and handouts are available from the UKOLN Web site.

Tony Hirst has also provided some useful definitions and pointers on his blog.