This post is by Peter Cudd BSc PhD, Senior Research Associate and project lead of Maavis at the School of Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield.Our project, Managed Access to Audio, Visual and Information Services (Maavis), is also being guided in its open development journey by OSS Watch. Open development has been a new experience for me and my colleagues, OSS watch’s input has been invaluable in providing insights and giving us a concerted plan to work towards having an active open development community. Our project is at an earlier phase but there have been some real differences to the traditional closed research and development we usually do.First and foremost is being able to talk openly with anyone about the project and what we are doing – this greatly facilitates engagement with new contacts without significant increased workload. This has lead to new partnerships and joint working. For example we have successfully obtained some Knowledge Transfer funding to help create a new version of Maavis and foster the open development community. Starting from the health and social care designed Maavis the goal is to have one suitable for community based Adult Education. In addition the Barnsley Adult Education Services will evolve their own open source development capability.Another significant difference is that the impact of competing similar ideas and technology is less than would be the case for a closed approach to research and development, the open development retains more ‘nett’ validity in pursuing further research and development.Although we have yet to post a Maavis web page – next on the agenda – we are already on the open development road and feel we are making good progress.Thanks OSS Watch.
It was very interesting to read about the MAAVIS project, as by chance I was looking for an application that would help adults with learning disabilities to upload and manage their media content more easily and then have easy viewing/search options.
As we are also starting out on this road of open source projects, it has been really wonderful to have a group that one can collaborate with and gain such amazing support – thank you OSS Watch as well!