As the CTO of Duraspace I try to find the synergies between our products and communities and external products and communities and set up projects to take advantage of them. Duraspace is a not-for-profit foundation in the US that supports the development of DSpace, Fedora commons and Duracloud.

What are you hoping to get out of Dev8D?

I'm here because it’s an opportunity to talk to many of our colleagues at the same place and the same time and look for project opportunities. This year I have tried to bring some more of the US repository developers here for the same purpose and to start to consider a similar event in the US.

It's been observed at many formal conferences in the past that many of the value and great ideas come out of the unscheduled sessions so the grand social experiment of Dev8D to build a conference that does that day in day out for several days is fascinating.

I was here last year and concluded that it's highly effective format and the challenge is to find ways to expand it both to a larger global community and increase the frequency so that the continuity of ideas is maintained. One somewhat idealistic vision for the future, but perhaps achievable, would be to have four Dev8D conferences spaced at roughly quarterly intervals in different areas of the globe. It would be impractical for most people to attend all four but it would allow the ideas and concepts that emerge to get a refresh every few months and you could track areas you are interested in through tweets and blogging and the other outputs. We're working on it!

Why do communities like Dev8D matter?

Developer communities have been self-organising for a long time and have shown themselves to be of value in fostering innovation and making efficient use of resources. They enable you to find out what's going on in other institutions and that saves time and money and gets a better product.

Dev8D demonstrates that you can set out to  have that as your sole goal – it doesn't have to be a secondary effect of some other goal.

 What do you think your organisation gains by you being here?

The organisation gains awareness of current areas of research and project development. It allows us to plan our own research and development to complement it.

farmaciagenerica24

I'm a 2^nd year computer science student at the University of Lincoln and I also work for the university's online services team as a developer. My fellow student Nick and I are full time students but we also do 10 hours or so a week on the services team to bring a “fresh new perspective to tired old computing”.

Why are you at Dev8D?

I have been involved with the development of the JISCpress 主要有効成分：シルデナフィル＋ダポキセチンの働き project and now that that it is out in the open it's got quite a lot of people talking about it and its potential and there's only so much talking you can do over Twitter. It's nice to get some physical feedback. For me personally, as I have been in charge of branding the site, I'd like to get some responses in terms of accessibility and visual feedback, and any ideas people might have in the event that the project is refunded. I want to gather ideas for that.

On a personal level, I want to do more networking and gain new skills. I'm particularly interested in the iPhone development workshops and several  others like the Python workshop and who knows what else at this stage!

Are you involved in any other communities?

I've written a few libraries for the CodeIgniter php framework. Also, my colleague Nick and I blog about a lot of the work we do as developers on the online service team. We want to see what other people are up to and give ideas to others – it's all about two-way idea sharing. I really enjoy being part of a community that really cares about something. I learn about stuff and like the idea that, hopefully, I have the potential to help or inspire others as well, having been inspired myself.

What kind of skills are you hoping to gain or improve at Dev8D?

I'm really interested in iPhone development. I have a few ideas for a university  mobile campus application which we haven't started yet but would like to – we need a kick up the backside to get it started and this might just be it. I'm also interested in being introduced to new ideas and new concepts in general. It’s only the first day but my impressions are good – JISC conferences are usually  brilliant.

What do you think Lincoln gains by sending you here?

For a start, they really gain a fresh perspective on computing by employing students. If I pick up something new here then it's something I can take to them, like the iPhone/mobile development ideas. Also, Lincoln gains through us knowing about the people who are working on similar projects outside the university. There can be a lot of overlap in academia and it helps to know the people doing the same kinds of work.

We all know that events like Dev8D are invaluable for their networking and community-building opportunities. But how can we measure the connections people make with each other at events? Dave Challis, a web developer from the University of Southampton, is using Twitter to find out how developers at dev8D are benefiting from networking.

“It’s very hard to judge the outcome of events and quantify how people meet and network. The systems people use to maintain their connections can be very disparate – some might have a small group on a mailing list or use a Facebook group or only connect through direct emails – but Twitter is growing rapidly and offers a simple means to look at relationships between people.

I thought it would be interesting to try to test a way of measuring the extent of networking at dev8D through Twitter as a lot of people here are using it heavily – it is even possible to sign up to the event wiki through Twitter. A week before the event I started to work out who of the people coming had twitter accounts and who they followed and who followed them. This is all publicly available information that you can search within the limits that Twitter allows to make requests.  I’ve been updating and storing that information with the idea of seeing how people and their relationships change over time – did participants at dev8D get to know each other and can we see that in an increase in the numbers following each other?

At the end of dev8d and a few days afterwards I will try to visualise the data in some way so that it is easy to see at a glance rather than on a spreadsheet.  I’m not sure yet how to do that but I’ve already spoken to a few people who have some ideas about how it might be done. That’s one of the good things about dev8D, that there is such a wide range of expertise. The chances are that you will meet someone who does the thing you are trying to do every day and can save you hours of work.

It will be nice if it ends up that we can clearly show that these people came here  and some knew each other and some didn’t and by the end there were this many more connections between the community.

There is no reason why it couldn’t be used for other events and it would be interesting to see how it works with other events. It’s ideal for developer events because Twitter is so widespread – I’d like to see it at IWMW.”

I’m a phd student at the University of Liverpool. I’m researching high performance computing for computational biology of the heart.

What are you hoping to get out of Dev8D?

I want to become a better developer. I spend a lot of my time in academia where people work with code but aren’t necessarily very good software engineers. It’s a good opportunity to come and learn from people who write code.  I had a really good experience last year and learnt a lot from doing it – it was a really enjoyable few days. I made a few contacts that I maintained, strengthened existing contacts, and met someone from my own building who I didn’t know existed!

Last year I collaborated on a project called Shh that was a social network that worked over the top of library catalogue access. It came together well and, despite my panicked rush to put the final thing together, we came third in the competition. I learnt about Javascript and about library catalogues – which was an alien subject to me – and it was an interesting collaboration. I’m hoping to collaborate on a project again this year; there’s not much community around what I do and I think it would help if there was more.

I’m struck by the scale of Dev8D this year compared to last year. There’s more people, more structure  – it has literally moved out of the basement.

What kind of skills are you hoping to gain or improve by being at Dev8D?

I’m interested to learn a couple of new languages, especially achat sur internet Clojure, and to try to improve knowledge of Python. I want to learn more about web services as I intend to go into a web development job when I finish my PhD in September.

What do you think your institution gains from you being here?

I was a better programmer when I got back last year!