dev8D

RepoChallenge Winners!

For the second year in a row the Developer Challenge at Open Repositories has revealed the significant contribution developers can make when asked to “show us the future of repositories”! This year over a dozen submissions were entered in the competition. Both JISC and Microsoft put up prizes for the top two prototypes. Four esteemed judges carefully selected a shortlist from the dozen, including (in no particular order):

* EM-LOADER by Fred Howell, Ian Stuart, Theo Andrew
* MentionIt by Tim Donohue
* EPrintsAppStore by David Tarrant, Tim Brody
* REPresent by Anoop Kumar
* FedoraFS by Rebecca Koeser
* DiscVac by Patrick McSweeney

From this list two winners were chosen, a champion and runner-up. The decision between the two came down to a single vote as both were worthy winners. The second place runner up was a prototype called FedoraFS by Rebecca Koesar who exposed Fedora as a desktop filestore using Fuse, while only a command line prototype at this point the ease of overlaying a Graphical User Interface with file-folder icons is all but a done deal:

The winner and new “RepoChallenge Champion” is Tim Donohue who coded up his MentionIt prototype with less than three-hundred lines of javascript. The idea itself was noted for its user centric focus on how the repository can actually bring value to the individual end user. By pulling back comments accross the web to the original repository paper the end user is able to see what is being said about the paper and where it is getting the most feedback.

Both Tim and Rebecca will be given $2000.00USD to use on attending the conference of their choice. Further judges comments and interviews with the winners will follow soon, so watch this (rss) space!

And the winner is!

The winner of the Developer Decathlon (including the £5,000.00 grand prize) is “List8D” by team Bsmmmm (Ben Charlton, Simon Yeldon, Matt Bull, Matt Spence, Matthew Slowe and Mark Fendley)! Read about their innovation and achievement on the JISC website!

Runner up (and winner of the £2,000.00 prize) is Lazy Lecturer by team “Three Lazy Geeks” (Ian Ibbotson, Mia Ridge and Peter Sefton). Watch their entry here.

Third place was close in the race as well, coming down to the wire and most deserving of some recognition (and potentially one of the most entertaining screencasts), the “sh!” prototype by team Rangtangdingdong (John Harrison, Ross McFarlane and Rob Sanderson). Video of prototype here.

Overall as stated in the last post (and shown by the glowing judges remarks) the competition was fierce and all the entries are incredibly deserving. We can only hope that most of these prototypes will be submitting a bid to the recently announced JISC funding call for projects in Rapid Innovation (tag: JISCRI). Make sure to stop by the last post and have a watch of all the prototypes.

Happiness is just around the corner

dev8D is almost upon us. Registration for the event is now closed and last minute preparations are afoot.

There will be a lot happening at the event so we have set up a Twitter account to communicate the latest news to delegates. So, if you are coming to dev8D and have a twitter account, make sure you follow @dev8D.

We will be using this blog to communicate things of interest during the event. This will include interviews, summaries of talks, any recordings we make and anything else of interest.

Another option for following what is happening at dev8D is the netvibes universe, this collects tweets, blogs and images of the event so should act as a window to the event.

Fingers crossed the weather will be kind and all your journeys will be problem free.

See you next week.

Aggregating dev8D

I have set up a netvibes universe for dev8D to attempt to aggregate some of the conversations that are occuring at and around the event.

The netvibes universe can be found at: http://www.netvibes.com/amcgregor#dev8D

Are there any other widgets or feeds that I should add to this page?