Many inspiring conversations made the TransferSummit conference, last week at Keble College in Oxford, a great success. The conference was chaired by OSS Watch alumnus Ross Gardler, now OpenDirective, who was responsible for putting together a excellent programme with a diverse range of sessions on open innovation in software. OSS Watch is a Silver Sponsor of TransferSummit and co-organised the conference. The programme was carefully crafted and the sessions followed on each other very nicely, telling the story of how open innovation can be successfully applied to software. We set up virtual tracks on specific topics to help delegates find their way through all the sessions. Still, an often-heard comment was that attendees found it difficult to choose which session out of the three tracks to attend, because so many appealed to them.
An addition to the overall programme this year was the Open Gadget Playtme. This showcased a number of open source hardware, or innovative hardware running open source software. For example, a RepRap printer was shown in action, an open source 3D printer that can print many of its own parts. Another example is the Rasperry Pi project, who aim to develop an ARM Linux box for $25, specifically aimed for use in teaching computer programming to children. This led to many interesting discussions about other applications of this technology, for example as part of a media streaming network.
Sessions were being presented by experts from diverse backgrounds, ranging from the academic sector, the business sector, and the public sector. This led to many interesting conversations about sharing experiences and the challenges in open innovation.
One compelling example of the kind of cross-sector discussions and engagement that TransferSummit facilitated was found in a session about the Apache Rave (Incubating) project . Matt Franklink of Mitre, with help from Ate Douma of Hippo, gave an presentation on how the project came about as a result of an initiative from six organisations, combining three code bases. In the audience was John Pybus of Oxford’s OeRC, who are working on the Bamboo project, an international collaborative research project that is developing tools and infrastructure for humanities researchers. As part of that project they are developing a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) platform, and they are already working together with one of the project partners on the Rave project. However, there is a compelling argument to move from reusing their isolated code base towards using and engaging with the Rave project. That would enable them to benefit from the programming efforts put in by all organisations involved. For Bamboo, it is important to know that they can build on a code base that will be sufficiently mature and supports the main features they need to build on. For Rave, it is an excellent opportunity to have another academic partner be involved with the project and with Bamboo’s input they can support a wider range of use cases.
This conversation and many others started at TransferSummit will hopefully lead to interesting new fruitful collaborations. OSS Watch will continue to play a facilitating role to connect people and projects relevant to the Higher Education sector to help foster open innovation. Do let us know about inspiring conversations you had at TransferSummit in the comments.
