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.

One of the lasting outcomes of our Total Recal ‘rapid innovation’ project in 2010, was that Alex Bilbie wrote the first (and only) OAuth 2.0 server for the CodeIgniter PHP development framework that we use. Since then, he’s been refining it and with every new project, we’ve been using it as part of our API-driven approach to development. As far as we know, the use of the OAuth 2.0 specification, which should be finalised at a forthcoming IETF meeting, is not yet being used by any other university in the UK. There are a few examples of OAuth revision A in use, but OAuth 2.0 is a major revision currently in its 23rd draft.

As a result of his work, Alex was invited to talk about OAuth 2.0 at Eduserv’s Federated Access Management conference last year.

Nick Jackson gave the same presentation at the Dev8D conference a couple of weeks ago.

Since Total Recal, we’ve used OAuth 2.0 for Jerome, data.lincoln.ac.uk, Zendesk, Get Satisfaction, and more recently Orbital and now ON Course.  We’re at the stage where our ‘single sign on’ domain https://sso.lincoln.ac.uk is the gateway to our OAuth 2.0 implementation and it will soon be running on two servers for redundancy. In short, due to various JISC projects helping pave the way, it has been formally adopted by central ICT Services, and staff and students are gradually being given control over what services their identity is bound to and what permissions those services have.

The work Nick is doing on the Orbital project is extending Alex’s OAuth 2.0 server to include some of the optional parts of the specification which we’ve not been using at Lincoln, such as refresh tokens and using HTTP Authentication with the client credentials flow. This means that the server is able to drop straight in to a wider range of projects and services.

Recently, JISC published a call for project proposal around Access and Identity Management (AIM), which I am starting to write a bid for. Appendix E1 states:

JISC is particularly interested in seeing innovative and new uses for OAuth. Bids should show how this technology brings benefits to the community and can help address institutional requirements within research, teaching and learning, work based learning, administration and Business Community Engagement.

In Total Recal, we released version 1 of the server code but have learned a lot since that project through integrating OAuth with other services. Version 2 of our OAuth server is more representative of our current implementation and fully implements the latest draft (23) of the specification.

However, this is what access and identity management currently looks like:

At the moment, the most widespread use of the OAuth server is Zendesk, our ICT and Estates online support service. Projects such as Jerome, Orbital, and ON Course, as well as three 3rd year Computer Science student dissertation projects are using it, too. The plan is to use OAuth alongside Microsoft’s Unified Access Gateway (UAG), which can talk SAML to OAuth via the OAuth SAML 2.0 specification. Here’s what we intend to do:

The primary driver for this is the ‘student experience’ and it cuts three ways:

1. Richer sharing of data between applications: A student or lecturer should be able to identity themselves to multiple applications and approve access to the sharing of personal data between those applications.
2. A consistent user experience: What we’re aiming for at first is not strictly ‘single sign on’, but rather ‘consistent sign on’, where the user is presented with a consistent UX when signing into disparate applications.
3. Rapid deployment: New applications that we develop or purchase should be easier to implement, plugging into either OAuth or the UAG and immediately benefiting from 1) and 2).

Following a recent meeting between ICT and the Library, we agreed to take the following steps:

1. All library (and ICT) applications that we operate internally must have Active Directory sign-in instead of local databases. Almost all of our applications achieve this already. This is the first step towards step (3).
2. All web-based applications must offer a consistent looking sign-in screen based on the sso.lincoln.ac.uk design (which uses the Common Web Design). This is the second step towards (3).
3. All systems must implement web-based single sign on via OAuth, SAML or ADFS and they will be sent to either UAG or the OAuth/SAML server.

The library are going to investigate to what extent we can do (2) with their applications such as Horizon and EPrints, and from then on, systems that are purchased or updated must do (3). It also makes sense to look at EPrints and WordPress in the short-term as applications that can use OAuth.

Two of the outputs we’ll propose to JISC are a case study of this work, as well as further development of the open source server Alex and Nick have been developing including an implementation of the OAuth SAML specification that we’ll share. Like our related work on staff profiles, the need to get access and identity right is becoming increasingly apparent as staff and students become accustomed to the way access and identity works elsewhere on the web. For Lincoln, a combination of OAuth and UAG is the preferred route to achieving consistent sign on across all applications, bridging both the internally facing business applications managed by ICT (e.g. Sharepoint, Exchange, Blackboard) and the more outward facing academic and social applications such as those developed and run by the Library and the Centre for Educational Research and Development.

This job is now formally open for applications.

Just a heads up to say that we’ll be advertising for a Web Developer to work on Orbital, our JISC-funded ‘Managing Research Data’ project. The post, starting in March/April, will be a 12 month, full-time, grade 5 (c.£21K) position.

The Web Developer (‘you’) will be working in the Centre for Educational Research and Development, alongside Nick Jackson, Lead Developer on Orbital, and also benefit from being in a team that includes staff in central ICT services and the Library. Orbital builds on and extends previous work we’ve been doing over the last couple of years, so if you’re interested, you should read through our projects pages.

If we were to summarise our technologies and interests I guess they would be #agile, #opensource, #opendata #LAMP, #php, #codeigniter, #mongoDB, #OAuth, #APIs, #HTML5, #CSS3, #github and moving towards #RDF and #LinkedData.

Just seeing these hashtags listed together should cause your heart to beat with excitement

When we advertise in January, you’ll see that the job spec is actually a pretty standard affair. What I want to emphasise here is how interesting and fun the job will be.

The key section in the Job Description is what you’d be working on with Nick:

1. Development and implementation of a set of web services, which re-use and develop our previous, JISC-funded work as well as other initiatives (e.g. SWORD and DataCite DOIs).
2. Documented source code will be made available under an open source license by the end of the project.
3. Development and implementation of mechanisms for managing and transferring data, including the use of MongoDB, OAuth, read/write RESTful APIs, SWORD2 interoperability, and integration with the administrative functions of EPrints.

That actually summarises a lot of work.

I’m managing the project and try to run things with as little hierarchy as possible within a university environment. You’ll always know the project priorities and will be trusted to self-organise and deliver on time, working to two-week iterations and, roughly, monthly releases. I regularly reflect on how we work and our overall working environment. For Orbital, I favour the Crystal Clear agile methodology, as does Nick. You’ll be encouraged to reflect on this with us, too.

We work hard, and not always 9-5pm, but we work at a pace that is sustainable over a long period of time. We take our work seriously but, in the spirit of hacking, are always looking for ways to have fun, too. We recognise that we’re fortunate to be working in a diverse and intellectually stimulating academic environment, but are user/product focused at the end of the day. You’ll be working directly with our users, who are Researchers in the School of Engineering and Siemens, and staff in the Library and ICT. You’ll need to be showing them refreshed, working software every couple of weeks and iteratively improving Orbital, based on their feedback and requirements. There may also be times when you’ll be asked to talk publicly about your work and you’ll be encouraged to blog about it every so often, too. I expect the project to produce one or two conference/journal papers, and you’ll be named as a contributor and can take as active role in that as you like.

I hope this sounds like an interesting job. At £21K, I recognise that it will probably attract younger developers looking to gain experience, though of course, we welcome applications from anyone whatever your age. By the time the post starts, we’ll have set up a decent dev/staging/production environment, hosted in the cloud, and relying on Github and Jenkins to keep things versioned, integrated and tested. Nick will have been developing Orbital for a couple of months or more and laid the groundwork for someone to start coding quickly in a supportive environment.

If you’re thinking of applying and don’t live in Lincoln, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s a decent small city, and a relatively cheap place to live. The campus is modern and sits by a Marina in the middle of the city. You can walk to work. I love the place. Oh, and you can choose your own hardware for development, within reason. Most of us use Macs, but whatever suits you. I’ll ask the successful candidate what they prefer when we offer them the job.

If, after reading around the project website, you’ve got any questions about the post, please do get in touch. Thanks.

* Wondering what the hell ‘web scale’ means? Something like this.

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.