Five minute interview: Ross Gardler
Who are you?
Ross Gardler, OSS Watch. A member of the Apache Software Foundation
What are your areas of interest?
Community development. And, outside work, family – with young children that’s all you have. The latest thing was making a fort.
What idea are you working on here?
As chair of judges I’m not working on an idea for the Decathlon but I’m doing a faceted browser for e-prints using the JSON export which has been made possible here at dev8D.
What are you looking for in the ideas, as a judge?
Collaboration. I’m looking for people bringing the best skills out of each individual member of the team they have brought together. Potential for real use, real applicability. Sam’s Twitter happiness-o-meter thing is cool but not applicable – cool stuff is cool but for the competition we need useful stuff. If people make the source code available then I reckon that’s a bonus although it certainly isn’t required.
What’s the major challenge in education software right now?
Collaboration. We’ve got too many silver bullet developers - they think they can do everything but, while they are often very talented, in reality to create a useful system, you need input from a range of people rather than just one superman or woman. There are a few universities collaborating on certain projects but there is very little large scale collaboration similar to that which happens in a sustainable open development communities where you have many commercial companies collaborating on a single code base.
In addition, we don’t engage with the users – as tech people we tend to listen to what they want and then take it forward into the shiniest, newest thing we can find but actually the user just wants something that works.
What are the most exciting developments in education software?
There is a momentum towards increasing the amount of collaboration between developers and this event is an example of that momentum becoming real. There’s a growing understanding of the fact that open source is not successful because it is open source but because of the way it is developed, in a collaborative fashion. Because people are beginning to understand it they are beginning to look at the way in which it can be applied in the academic environment
What have you learnt so far / interesting things have you heard?
At the Agile development talk yesterday I was intrigued by the fact that some people feel like they are doing Agile development but do not understand that it is not possible to do it without the collaboration aspect of a co-located team. I thought I would be shouted down about this when I brought it up in my session which followed but was pleasantly surprised that there was a general consensus that open development model is actually very close to the Agile model but solves some of the problems of teams that are not co-located. So I learned something from doing my session which I that I don’t have as big a struggle as I thought I had!