The cost of developing a good idea

How much does a student hacker need to develop a good idea to the point that it attracts further investment?

I’ve been thinking about this recently for a couple of reasons. I was reading the early Y Combinator site, via the Wayback Machine, about how they reckoned on $6,000 per person for their first Summer Founders Program. Each new startup could expect to receive less than $20K (the average is $17,000 / £10,000), with two or three friends being the ideal number of founders per company. The Summer Founders Program was aimed at undergraduate or graduating students.

I’ve also been looking at JISC’s Elevator funding programme, where people working in UK universities and colleges (with a *.ac.uk email address), are able to pitch an idea to receive up to £10,000 funding from JISC.  That’s the same amount of money Y Combinator seeds their successful applicants with. I think the JISC Elevator is a great idea, but looking at the proposals that have been submitted so far, I’m surprised and disappointed that there aren’t any proposals where the money goes directly to students to develop ideas of their own.  Maybe students haven’t been told? I’ll admit I’ve not publicised it at Lincoln, having been busy bidding for other JISC funds (where graduating 3rd year students are the main contributors to the projects) and awarding funds to projects of our own (where students receive most of the money). Still, I feel bad about not supporting JISC Elevator more. I have voted for one proposal.

I asked Alex, an undergrad and co-worker, how much a student who is hacking on an idea all day, every day, needs to live on in Lincoln, and he reckons about £600/month. That sounds harsh to me, so let’s assume they need £800/month and that there are three of them, because after all, if you can’t persuade a couple of friends that an idea is worth working on, then it probably isn’t a very good idea (or so says Y Combinator). On a related note, Google’s Summer of Code provides students with a $5000/£3000 stipend for the summer.

When I first heard about the JISC Elevator, my immediate thought was that the £10K maximum per project isn’t very much to attract FEC costed projects involving staff, but is perfect for offering to students as bursaries. A bursary, as I understand it, is supposed to cover the costs of living, rather than being seen as a wage, so they’re similar in purpose to the GSoC and Y Combinator funds. On our DIVERSE project, almost all of the money received went to paying the fees and bursaries of two MRes students. We are also prepared to contribute a larger percentage of the overall cost. Our recently funded beBOP project is an example of this, with a recent graduate being employed on grade 4, and the funding from JISC covering only 65% of the overall cost, compared to the maximum 80%.

I’ll admit, I don’t really understand how FEC works and where a lot of the money actually goes, but for the kinds of projects that the JISC Elevator is trying to attract, as well as JISC’s Rapid Innovation calls, I do wonder whether the GSoc or Y Combinator model of funding is a more cost-effective one. Pay students to hack over the summer, with a member of staff overseeing their work and call that the institutional contribution. £10K will pay for three students to hack over the summer, travel to a conference to talk about their work and pay for some servers on Rackspace for a few months. The tools to develop software in the early stages are cheap (a basic Linux stack on Rackspace is £7/month and there are enough open source tools available to explore ideas and develop prototypes, even if the ideal tool happens to be a proprietary one.

At Lincoln, we recognise that, given the opportunity and mentorship, undergraduate students have much to contribute. They’re not simply consumers of education. Like other universities, we’ve been running funding programmes each year that fund students to work on a research project with a member of staff over the summer. At Lincoln, it’s called UROS, the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Scheme. The Student as Producer UROS call was announced a few days ago. The LNCD group, which I co-ordinate awarded five projects £1000 each last week, which focus on the use of technology for education (more info on those projects soon). For the UROS and LNCD funded projects, almost all of the £1000 goes on undergraduate student bursaries. In my experience, undergraduate hackers can produce good work. Work that’s worth funding. Y Combinator thought so, too, and they’re now the most admired angel fund among young hackers. Each Y Combinator funded start-up is now guaranteed $150,000 as follow on funding by another investor. If you go Wayback to the first Summer Founders Program FAQ, you’ll see this:

Why are you doing this?

Partly because we feel guilty that we all got rich almost seven years ago, and still haven’t yet given seed money to new startups; partly because we think it is an interesting hack; and partly because we think it may actually make money.

We suspect that students, and particularly undergrads, are undervalued. Twenty years ago the idea of grad students starting companies would have seemed odd. Not after Yahoo and Google. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads too?

I agree. Undergraduates can do it and I think institutions, together with JISC, should be thinking about our own Hatchery for Hackers.

LNCD, DevXS and Orbital

It’s been a busy summer, to say the least.

The DIVERSE project is up and running and the Linking You and Jerome projects came to a successful end. We were joined by Jamie Mahoney, a new full-time Web Developer Intern and established a new group (LNCD). We’re co-organising a national student developer conference (DevXS) and have just been awarded a £241,500 grant for Orbital, an 18 month project to develop and pilot a new research infrastructure for the School of Engineering. Orbital is a great opportunity to build on some of our earlier work and get stuck into the challenges of managing raw research data. Which reminds me: data.lincoln.ac.uk is live, too 🙂

Please do tell your students about DevXS.

    Orbital: A proposed Managing Research Data project

    Following my usual tradition, I am dutifully posting a bid document that I submitted today to JISC’s Managing Research Data Programme. As you might already know, I do this in an attempt to open up the process of bid writing a bit more, in what is normally a competitive environment. I also hope that it might attract some interest from and possible future collaboration with other people in the university sector, whether we are successful in winning funding or not. We’ve been pretty successful with our bids over the last couple of years, too, and have received good feedback from JISC on the quality of our bids, so it seems like the decent thing to share good practice.

    Our proposed project is called Orbital because we’re intending to build services for managing research data that ‘orbit’ around Nucleus, the data store we built during the Total Recal and Jerome projects. The bid was a pretty easy one to write, to be honest. Everything felt right as soon as I read the call documentation because I could see a way of re-using and further developing the work we’ve been doing since I joined the university in 2007. Of course, we’ve set ourselves some new challenges with this project and much work needs to be done in all phases of the project, but having the experience of building web services around large institutional data sets, gives me the confidence that we can tackle what is a really important issue for us – for any university: managing a growing body of research data. It’s also a project that takes me back to my roots, having joined the university to work on our Institutional Repository project. Prior to that I was an Archivist at the BFI National Film and Television Archive and Project Manager for the development of Amnesty International’s Digital Asset Management system. It was good to revisit the the whole digital archiving domain again and I even re-discovered a blog I kept in 2006 while on JISC’s week-long Digital Preservation Training Programme.

    Although the bid has been sent off now, and who knows whether it will be funded or not, the process of writing the bid has been really useful. I had planned to spend much of July drafting a journal paper but seeing the call, switched into bid writing mode. Writing bids regularly, I try to get something out of them, despite knowing that they may not be funded. The idea of retrospectively viewing unfunded bids as a waste of time would depress the hell out of me and so I try to approach it as a reflective process, where I talk with colleagues about what we’ve done, where were are now and where we want to go with our work. Through writing this bid, it became really clear how the work we’ve been doing on other projects has brought us to the point where we have a good team of people who have developed a very modern, extensible and flexible technical framework which we can deploy in a number of domains, including managing research data. It’s all in the bid, so I won’t repeat it here, but it’s something we should be proud of.

    I think that one of the things that good developers do is identify and/or build the tools they need to do their job effectively. That’s what we’ve been doing with WordPress, the Common Web Design, OAuth, Nucleus, data dot lincoln,  the Jerome discovery tool and the Linking You toolkit, so that now we have the skills and the tools to tackle future work more efficiently and have fun, too. There’s nothing that kills the fun of development more than having to work with crap tools.

    DIVERSE: A new JISC-funded project

    I’m pleased to report that this week, Dr. John Murray and I were awarded one of JISC’s Teaching and Learning Innovation Grants. As usual, you can read the full bid to JISC on Google Docs. Very roughly, it’s a study of what happens when Social Bookmarking and Learning Analytics meets Student as Producer. I think it’s going to be a really interesting project, and I’m looking forward to working with John, the Principle Investigator, and two of his students.

    This project will undertake a cross-departmental study of the use of ‘resource clouds’ for subject research, peer-review and validation of materials. It will build on DIVERSE, a tool for crowd-sourcing relevant subject resources, to determine student understanding of lecture and assignment topics. Through an analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, it will examine why students favour particular resources, determine how reading lists can be more effectively created and provide case studies of how students can contribute to lecture design.

    This programme of funding requires a different application process, using a template and interview format. I think this is to improve the efficiency of bidding and judging, although in my case I spent more time on this bid and then preparing for the interview than any previous application! I quite enjoyed it and the online interview afforded me a bit more confidence than sitting face to face in a room as I was able to refer to written notes a lot more than if were I in right in front of the panel.

    While talking to the interview panel I realised that I am in a fortunate position to be working in the Centre for Educational Research and Development, which leads the University’s Teaching and Learning Strategy (Student as Producer), as well as sharing the responsibility for technology for research, teaching and learning with the Library and ICT department. It’s these close working relationships with all the right people and the great support and enthusiasm we have from the Vice Chancellor’s Office, the Dean of Teaching and Learning, Head of ICT and the University Librarian, that allows me to talk with confidence about undertaking and sustaining our work.

    As you’ll see from the full grant application, development of the DIVERSE tool was funded internally by the Student as Producer project under our Fund for Educational Development. I’m happy to say that DIVERSE will be the first project that our new group provides support for as we intend to do for many other projects. We’ll be ensuring that John and his students are able to integrate the DIVERSE tool into our CWD+Nucleus+OAuth framework over the summer in time for the new academic year.

    This is exactly the model that I hope we can keep repeating: students and staff with good ideas around the use of technology for education (it doesn’t have to be software development!)  bid internally for a small amount of funding where required and, if successful, then we provide the appropriate institution-wide advocacy and support (technical integration, training, joint research, etc.). If such projects are also able to attract external funding, it suggests we’re doing the right thing.

    Two new JISC-funded projects

    Just a short note to record that in the last week, I’ve been informed that both our recent bids to JISC will be funded. The projects start on February 1st, just as Total ReCal is formally closing. As you can imagine, we’re all extremely pleased to be able to undertake this work over the next few months and are grateful for the backing that the funding provides.

    Here are summaries of the project bids. You can read the full bid documents by clicking on the links.

    Linking You << get it? ‘Lincoln U’ :-) (Google doc) (blog)

    Like most other HEIs, Lincoln’s web presence has grown ‘organically’ over the years, utilising a range of authoring and content management technologies to satisfy long-term business requirements while meeting the short-term demands of staff and students. We recognise the value of our .ac.uk domain as an integral part of our ‘Learning Landscape’ and, building on recent innovations in our Online Services Team, intend to re-evaluate the overall underlying architecture of our websites with a range of stakeholders and engage with others in the sector around the structure, persistence and use of the open data we publish on the web. Some preliminary work has already been undertaken in this area and we wish to use this opportunity to consolidate what we have learned as well as inform our own work through a series of wider consultations and engagement with the JISC community.

    Jerome (Google doc) (blog)

    Jerome began in the summer of 2010, as an informal ‘un-project’, with the aim of radically integrating data available to the University of Lincoln’s library services and offering a uniquely personalised service to staff and students through the use of new APIs, open data and machine learning. Jerome addresses many of the challenges highlighted in the Resource Discovery Taskforce report, including the need to develop scale at the data and user levels, the use of third-party data and services and a better understanding of ‘user journeys’. Here, we propose to formalise Jerome as a project, consolidating the lessons we have learned over the last few months by developing a sustainable, institutional service for open bibliographic metadata, complemented with well documented APIs and an ‘intelligent’, personalised interface for library users.

    Writing JISC bids

    Last night, I submitted two bids to JISC’s Infrastructure for Education and Research programme and, having submitted a few bids to JISC over the last year or so, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about my experience bidding for funding. Maybe it mirrors your experience, too. I’d be interested to know. Like every other bid I’ve written, you can read them online if you like:

    JISCPress (Google doc) – Awarded £26K

    JISCPress Benefits & Realisation Tender (Google doc) – Awarded £10K

    ChemistryFM (PDF) – Awarded £18K

    Powering Down? – Not funded. Read the judges positive comments in the postscript of this blog post.

    Total ReCal (Google doc) – Awarded £28K

    I might also add our Talis bid, which could just as easily have been a JISC bid. It was not funded but the judges liked it.

    And the latest two:

    Linking You << get it? ‘Lincoln U’ 🙂 (Google doc) UPDATE: Awarded £14K

    Like most other HEIs, Lincoln’s web presence has grown ‘organically’ over the years, utilising a range of authoring and content management technologies to satisfy long-term business requirements while meeting the short-term demands of staff and students. We recognise the value of our .ac.uk domain as an integral part of our ‘Learning Landscape’ and, building on recent innovations in our Online Services Team, intend to re-evaluate the overall underlying architecture of our websites with a range of stakeholders and engage with others in the sector around the structure, persistence and use of the open data we publish on the web. Some preliminary work has already been undertaken in this area and we wish to use this opportunity to consolidate what we have learned as well as inform our own work through a series of wider consultations and engagement with the JISC community.

    Jerome (Google doc) UPDATE: Awarded £36K

    Jerome began in the summer of 2010, as an informal ‘un-project’, with the aim of radically integrating data available to the University of Lincoln’s library services and offering a uniquely personalised service to staff and students through the use of new APIs, open data and machine learning. Jerome addresses many of the challenges highlighted in the Resource Discovery Taskforce report, including the need to develop scale at the data and user levels, the use of third-party data and services and a better understanding of ‘user journeys’. Here, we propose to formalise Jerome as a project, consolidating the lessons we have learned over the last few months by developing a sustainable, institutional service for open bibliographic metadata, complemented with well documented APIs and an ‘intelligent’, personalised interface for library users.

    At this point, I should give a few words of appreciation to Paul Stainthorp, Alex Bilbie, Nick Jackson, Chris Goddard and David Young, who helped me put these recent bids together. In particular, Paul worked with me on and off over the weekend to finish off the Jerome bid and it is all the better for it. And that brings me on to the first point I want to make about working with people.

    Open bid writing

    I don’t have that much experience raising funds. I wrote my first bid (JISCPress) in April last year with Tony Hirst, at the Open University, who I didn’t really know at the time but has since become a friend and I am now Co-Director of a not-for-profit company with him. The JISCPress project was based on some fun we were having outside of work to try to open up the way that the government consulted with the public. As you can see from the bid, we simply wrote up the ideas we were having based on our trials and errors with WriteToReply. Because of the nature of the project, we wrote the bid in public, inviting anyone to contribute or simply observe. We told lots (hundreds? thousands?) of people we were doing this through our online networks. It was liberating to write it in this way and we’ve since been commended by staff at JISC for taking this approach. Some seasoned bid writers were quite surprised that we would do such a thing, but Tony and I wanted to make a point that bid writing could be an inclusive and collaborative endeavour, rather than a secretive and competitive exercise. Neither of us felt like we had anything to lose by working in this way. It was my first bid and raising funds was not something expected of me at the time (hang on?! it’s still not in my job description! 😉 )

    Anyway, we got the funding and then some more funding and the award winning outcomes of the project are now in use by JISC and hundreds of other people. I continue to work on it with the original team, despite the period of funding being over.

    I still write most of my bids online and in public, but I don’t shout about it these days. After I was funded once, the pressure to repeat the process has, alas, made me more cautious and frankly I hate this. I still publish and blog about the bids I’ve made shortly after they’ve been submitted, but I’ve not quite repeated the openness and transparency that Tony and I attempted with JISCPress. Shaun Lawson, a Reader in Computer Science, and I replied to the Times Higher about this subject last week suggesting that there is much to be gained from open bid writing. ((“We read with interest the suggestion by Trevor Harley (“Astuteness of crowds”; 4th November 2010) that the peer review of grant applications could be replaced by crowdsourcing. We suggest going even further in this venture of harnessing the potentially limitless cognitive surplus of the academy (apologies to John Duffy “Academy Untoward” also 4th November 2010) and crowdsourcing the process of authoring the grant proposal itself. Our reasoning is that, given enough wisdom from the idling academic crowd, an individual proposal could be ironed completely free of half-baked rationales, methodological flaws, over-budgeted conference travel and nebulous impact statements and would, therefore, be guaranteed a place near the top of any ranking panel. On a serious note, we do believe there is much to be gained by both applicants and funders adopting a more transparent, collaborative and open grant bidding process, in which researchers author a funding proposal collectively and in public view using, for instance, wikis or Google docs. Indeed, we have ourselves successfully piloted such an approach (http://lncn.eu/r23), which mirrors the more positive aspects of the ‘sandpit’ experience, and unreservedly recommend it to other researchers.”)) I recall, also, that in a podcast interview, Ed Smith, the Deputy Chairman of HEFCE warned that competition in the bidding process might better be replaced with more collaborative submissions in the future as funding gets tighter.

    I know there are staff in JISC that really do favour this approach, too, and I wonder whether JISC, advocates of innovation in other institutions, might attempt to innovate the bid writing process by requiring that all bids received must demonstrate that they have been written openly, in public and genuinely solicited collaboration in the writing process. We are all used to submitting bids with partners and collaborative bid writing is quite the norm behind closed doors, but why not require that the bid writing is collaborative and open, too? JISC could at least try this with one of their funding calls and measure the response.

    From ‘un-projects’ to projects

    The other point I want to make is the value of being able to write bids that are simply a formalisation of work we’ve already started. There must be few things more soul destroying that being asked to look at the latest funding programme and conjure up a project to fit the call (I don’t do it). Like JISCPress, all the other bids that I’ve been successful in receiving funds for were based on work (actually, better described as ‘fun’) that we’d been doing in our ‘spare time’, evenings and weekends. We were, in effect, already doing the projects and when the right funding call came up, we applied to it, demonstrating to JISC that we were committed to the project and offering a clear sense of the benefits to the wider community. JISCPress was based on WriteToReply, ChemistryFM was based on my work on the Lincoln Academic Commons, Total ReCal, Jerome and Linking You are all based on a variety ((Jerome has its own blog, and we all blog regularly about work we’re doing.)) of work that Alex, Nick, Paul and, to a lesser extent I, have been doing in between other work. What’s worth underlining here is that we’re fortunate to have Snr. Managers at the University of Lincoln, who support us and encourage a ‘labs’ approach to incubate ideas. Inevitably, it means that we end up working outside of our normal hours but that because we’re interested in the work we’re doing and when a funding call comes up and it aligns with our work, we apply for it. As you know, to ‘win’ project funding is an endorsement of your work and ideas and it confirms to us and, importantly, to Snr. Management, that working relatively autonomously in a labs environment can pay off.

    A supportive environment

    Up to now, I’ve tried to make the point that when I write a bid, it is a somewhat open, collaborative process that proposes to formalise and build on work that we’re already doing and what we already know. I know that this is not uncommon and is not a guaranteed ‘secret to success’, but it is worth underlining. Finally, I want to acknowledge the wider support I receive from colleagues at the university, in particular from David Young and Annalisa Jones in the Research Office. I know from talking with people in other institutions that often, the bid writers remain responsible for putting the budget together (no simple task) and have to jump through bureaucratic hoops to even get the go ahead for the bid and then find a senior member of staff who will sign the letter of support. Fortunately, in my experience at Lincoln it is quite the opposite. I have very little to do with pinning down the budget. I go to the Research Office for 30 mins, explain the nature of the project, the amount we can bid for and the kind of resources we will need and a day or so later, I am provided with the budget  formatted in JISC’s template. Likewise, the letters of support are turned around in a matter of hours, too, leaving me to focus on the bid writing. There is never any question of whether I should submit a bid or not as I’m trusted to be able to manage my own time and likewise, the other people involved in the projects are trusted too. Of course, we discuss the bids with our managers while writing them and if they are concerned with the objectives or the amount of time we might be committing to the project, they are able to say so, but because we write bids that are based on work we’re already doing, it’s much easier to know whether a bid is viable.

    So that’s how it’s worked for me so far. I sent off two bids last night and I felt they were the strongest I’ve submitted so far, not least because of all the work that Paul, Alex and Nick have been doing. Frankly, neither of these bids would have been written were it not for their good work so far and their energy and enthusiasm for ‘getting stuff done’. Of course it will be nice if one or both bids are funded but the process of writing formally about the work we are doing is a worthwhile process in itself, as it helps to situate it in the wider context of work at the university and elsewhere. Now, the bids are in it’s time to relax a bit and get on with something else.

    Total ReCal (or Calendar Combiner C^2). A proposed JISC Rapid Innovation project

    I’ve just submitted this funding proposal to JISC, under their Flexible Service Delivery programme call. As usual, I’m keen to share bids sooner rather than later, whether they are successful or not. Go here for the full bid or just read the summary below. Comments always welcome. Thanks.

    Building on a university-wide initiative to improve collaborative, undergraduate research, this student-driven project will discuss, document and develop API plugins for a number of common corporate applications in the HE sector. The plugins will expose space-time data in an open, standardised format that can then be queried and aggregated by a student-centred calendaring service, which will also be developed during the course of the project.

    The work undertaken by the project will improve the student experience by providing end-users with a cutting-edge, centrally supported calendaring service driven by existing aggregate services at the University of Lincoln. The plugins, full documentation and further libraries and code examples for the service will be offered to the JISC community for use by their own institutions.

    UPDATE: I’m pleased to say that this funding application was successful. 🙂

    OPACPress: Our Talis Incubator proposal

    Yesterday, I submitted a proposal to Talis under their Incubator fund. If successful, I would have the pleasure of working with Paul Stainthorp, E-Resources Librarian at the University of Lincoln, and Casey Bisson,  Information Architect at Plymouth State University. The bid is to develop an idea which I’ve posted about before, based on Casey’s work on Scriblio and our adventures with WordPress MU, in particular, JISCPress.

    Anyway, rather than re-iterating the bid here. You can read it in full by clicking here.

    Comments are very welcome. Thanks.

    UPDATE: We made it into the second round of judging but were unsuccessful in the end. Here’s the useful and fair feedback we received.

    • like the idea and how, like the Moodle repository, it can help open up existing content through data sharing. The same question as for others remains of how and why institutions would subscribe to the service.
    • I like this but I think it significantly underestimates the IP issues around library catalogue records which has been a major stumbling block for other activities in this area. That said, I think it is worth taking forward at this stage. The team looks very strong.
    • Ambitious in scope and technology, but /feels/ right for the innovative approach of this fund.
    • “Imagine that a significant number of UK universities and colleges… chose to make use of such a platform.” This type of language frightens me, indicating that they have no partnerships established, where other proposals already do. The point on issues with catalog records (above) should not be overlooked.
    • The use cases won me over. Not without risks ( as they say) and some major challenges
    • this one strikes me as particularly promising, because it has such strong ties to UK institutions and could connect to things Talis does