Last week JISC CETIS put on a WidgetBash event. OSS Watch pitched in since W3C Widgets are an area we are particularly interested in having taken some code from the University of Bolton into the Apache Software Foundations incubator as Apache Wookie (incubating).
This two day event focused on getting people up to speed on building widgets. Our approach was to give some very light touch training and then get our hands dirty on code. Overall the two days were extremely successful.
in the run up to the event I had committed a few new widget templates to Wookie in order to make it easy for people to get started. This turned out to be a great tactic. Some attendees used these templates as a base for their work, looking to enhance them, one attendee even submitted a patch to fix an error in my work (which I have now committed to the project, thanks Sam Rowley). Another attendee reported that one of the tutorials was misleading (another issue I have now addressed, thanks Simon Booth).
A team from the Manchester Metropolitan University enhanced a widget they had already created to tell students which labs had available PCs in them. Now it’s a fully geo-locating widget that sorts the results by proximity to the users position (interestingly using the tutorial Simon helped us improve). Another team from Strathclyde enhanced the Moodle Plugin for Wookie; now widgets are able to get a little more context from Moodle and thus provide more targeted information to the user. We hope to see patches and contributions from both these teams.
Many other participants who had never build widgets before reported that they’d learned a great deal. There were plenty of “almost working” enhancements to our templates as well as completely new widgets. Again, I look forward to applying their patches.
Why not come and join us on the Wookie project and find out what it’s all about.
You can read more about the two days on Sheila’s blog.
There’s no date on his introductory post, but Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, has provided an opportunity for us to state which open standards for IT we want the UK government to use. This takes the form of an on-line SurveyMonkey survey that is open until 20 May 2011.
Government must be better connected to the people it serves and partners who can work with it – especially small businesses, voluntary and community organisations. Government ICT must play a fundamental role in making life easier and I want to ensure that it does.
One of our first goals is to organise Government data and systems using an agreed set of standards that make our ICT more open, cheaper and better connected.
If you’re a business or community organisation, helping us choose the right standards will make it easier for you to do business with Government. It will also help us open up data, better informing your decisions, and hopefully prompting innovation.
There’s a lot of detail in the very long list of obtuse standard numbers, but fortunately a mechanism is provided to skip sections you aren’t interested in. Otherwise you can vote on each standard on a scale between mandatory and don’t use. Refreshingly for a survey, there are spaces for you to add your own thoughts (though you can’t add each on a new line as requested).
I spotted couple of typos and more seriously, the Microsoft originated ISO/IEC 29500 Office Open XML is incorrectly called ‘Open Office XML. This is bound to lead to confusion as the alternatively listed ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) standard was originally implemented in OpenOffice (and is now implemented by LibreOffice).
Open standards play well with open source software developement and we encourage you to take the survey. However do bear in mind the government’s past record in implementing open technology policies. You might also want to look at Glyn Moody’s related post about the Government’s definition of open standards provided in the procurement policy note.
