Audiences
Increasingly at JISC we are asking projects to look at who their audiences are and what the audience would like from the project. I thought I’d write a post to explain what it is we are looking for as I realise it can be quite a confusing area. I’d also welcome comments from those who are grappling with this at the moment so we can improve the advice we give and hopefully make it a positive experience for all concerned.
To set the background, looking in much more detail at audiences has recently become important for JISC. Back in the ‘Thousand Flowers’ days we knew broadly who the audience was for projects and it was sufficient to broadly outline who the key stakeholders were (which, note, could be a larger group than the audience). What was important was to get small projects out there experimenting with the technology and passing those lessons on to quite a broad audience who would pick up what was of interest to them. Some projects would fail as a result of not quite connecting with their audience or simply not having an audience but that was all part of the risk-taking we did for the sector. Fast forward to today and we are commissioning some very large projects and we are getting some of those to go along what we call the Development to Service route. What this means is that we are interested in how they go from being a good idea to being something that can be used by others. Unfortunately JISC can’t support all of those projects so we have to know which ones are of particular interest and for the others we’d like to help them find funding from other sources. This is where knowing who could use the service and who would be interested in funding it proves to be vital.
So, how do you go about doing that? I’ve tried to combine some do’s and don’ts below from projects that have been both successful and unsuccessful in finding audiences to use them.
DO:
- Get engaged with your community through events, mailing lists, blogs, etc and find out what they think about your idea and who they think would find it useful. They are also likely to have some useful input into what you need to do. A good recent example is my last post that I did on OpenID; the JISC-SHIB list are actively discussing its conclusions and helping suggest how we can take it forward;
- Identify named communities, institutions, companies and organisations who would be interested in your project. It is so much easier if you can name members of your audience. So, for example, my NAMES project is working very closely with the British Library. That is so much better than saying the audience is ‘those in the academic community who would be interested in an authoritative registry of academic names’;
- Work with those named entities to establish their interest in your project. They could well help with testing intial demos and prototypes or be able to offer some financial asssistance or resources in other areas such as connections to other similar initiatives or those who could help you;
- Talk with your programme manager who may be able to suggest useful people to get in touch with or audiences it may be useful to engage with;
- Put the work in on your project plan to identify key named audiences, record who those are and come back and revisit these, changing them as necessary;
- Get a demo or prototype out early so your potential audiences can see what it is you are doing and get to grips with it;
- Come along to JISC organised events such as Andy McGregor’s Developer Happiness Days or the JISC Conference as they provide a good opportunity to talk about what you are doing and find more potential named interested parties for your audience;
DON’T:
- Define your audience so widely that it will be impossible to take practical action to engage with them. If you’re aiming at ‘the UK academic community’ or ‘those interested in repositories’ then you need to be doing some more work;
- Skimp on engaging with your audience and getting their feedback. You need their interest even if JISC are doing the funding as it provides evidence that what you are doing is useful;
- Use surveys as a substitute for engaging with your audience or finding it. Surveys are useful but they can’t be used on their own;
Hopefully that is helpful and if you have something to add to the above then please post a comment.
JISC OpenID Report
This morning I got the final copy of this report so I popped it straight up onto the JISC site, which means you can see it around lunchtime if you click here.
We feel this is an important report for the sector as it reviews a technology that we constantly get asked questions about and up to now we haven’t had authoritative answers for. OpenID is, without a doubt, an important technology but up until now there hasn’t been a comprehensive review of how it could be used in the higher and further education sectors. This has led to a lot of speculation and rhetoric with very strong advocates for the technology but, equally, very strong critics. We’re hoping this report will inform the debate, particularly given the project has also developed a gateway between OpenID and the UK federation so those with OpenID credentials can access Shibbolised resources (subject to the resource provider being happy with providing access).
Overall, the conclusions were:
i) there is considerable interest in OpenID in the commercial market place, with players such as Google and Microsoft taking an active interest. However,
ii) all commercial players want to be OpenID providers, since this gives them some control over the users, but fewer want to be service providers since this increases their risks without any balancing rewards
iii) until we can get some level of assurance about the registration of users and their attributes with the OpenID providers, it won’t be possible to use OpenID for granting access to resources of any real value. In other words, without a trust infrastructure OpenID will remain only of limited use for public access type resources such as blogs, personal repositories, and wikis
iv) imposing such a trust infrastructure with barriers to the acquisition and use of OpenIDs may be seen to negate its open-access, user-centric advantages
v) OpenID has a number of security vulnerabilities that currently have not been addressed, but at least one of these is also present in the current UK federation.
The implications from this are:
i) Whilst OpenID does have its security vulnerabilities and weaknesses, some of these are also shared by Shibboleth as it is currently designed. Other technologies may subsequently solve these and therefore this could have implications for the UK federation.
ii) The UK federation as currently deployed has a significant shortcoming which is the readiness of IdPs to disclose the real-world identity of users to SPs (as distinct from providing opaque persistent identifiers to support simple customisation). This is not a technical shortcoming but an operational one. Whilst it is relatively easy to solve, until it is, it limits the applicability of Shibboleth to personalised and other services which need to know who the users are. OpenID does not suffer from this limitation and therefore there might be use for it in some scenarios where trust issues can be resolved.
And, finally, the recommendations are:
i) The UK academic community should keep track of both OpenID and CardSpace identity management systems as they evolve. There is clearly a great demand for a ubiquitous secure identity management system, but no consensus yet as to what this should be.
ii) Now that a publicly available OpenID gateway has been built, publicise its availability to the community and monitor its applications and usage. If usage becomes substantial, consider productising the service.
iii) Consider offering a more secure and more trustworthy gateway registration service for SPs that do not use, or use more than, the eduPersonPrincipalName attribute. This will allow them to use OpenIDs for authentication and a wider selection of eduPerson attributes for authorisation. (The current self-registration service is clearly open to abuse).
I’d welcome any comments on the report and/or gateway. I think what we need to do is to keep the debate going and share experience to ensure that researchers and learners can get the most of OpenID.
AHM2008
I am currently sitting waiting for a sleeper back to London so it seemed a good time to reflect on this year’s All Hands Meeting that I attended in Edinburgh, the main annual e-Science conference in the UK. There were several changes for this year. The first was the venue so goodbye to the East Midlands Conference Centre and hello to a multi-location venue in Edinburgh. I think the overall reaction was positive with a variety of places to meet up with colleagues both on and off site and a series of venues from the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) to the Appleton Tower and the very shiny and slick Informatics Forum. Accommodation was a little far from the main venue locations but had wireless and a good breakfast (always essential to get me going in the morning!). Dinner was also very well received at Dynamic Earth, with plenty to look around before the dinner and plenty of opportunities to mix with colleagues old and new. I was rather less convinced about having coffee breaks that ran through the sessions but most people seemed to get used to it and there was a good deal of material to fit in so you could forgive the programme committees from running out of space to get it all in! So, down to the sessions, which proved notable this year for being very much focused on researchers carrying out good research enabled by e-Science. It seemed that this year we saw a good deal more adoption of the tools that we’ve heard about in previous years and that was good to see. Whilst tool development is still vital, it’s equally vital that the tools are used in a production environment.My first session was a BoF run by Alex Hardisty and Neil Chue Hong on e-Infrastructure. I think the level of attendance rather took the organisers by surprise and a couple of thought-provoking presentations helped kick off our consideration of the subject material. I’ll pop a link in here to the conclusions of the session when I get it but, in summary:
- e-Infrastructure is for everyone and is useful for a range of different challenges. What determines its success is how it is used;
- e-Infrastructure is increasingly being used by researchers as part of what they do on a day to day basis;
- There are increasingly varied ways in which e-infrastructure can be used and this is likely to get more diverse into the future;
- There is a mix of requirements from e-Infrastructure. Some are quite happy to glue together components and use it in a very ad hoc way. Others would like a more structured approach. All in all, it’s quite a complex landscape so it’s important to work with the researchers as to what best suits what they are doing;
- e-Infrastructure is already part of everyday research and that is likely to get to be more so as time goes on;
My first event followed after the BoF. We’d invited an Australian delegation led by Dr Ann Borda to a drinks reception so that they could meet up with the eResearch team and members of the JISC Support of Research Committee (JSR). There were some great conversations as all of the eResearch team got a chance to swap experiences of eResearch. From my side, I got up to date with Australian developments in eResearch tools with Jane Hunter, Paul Davies and Ann Borda. I also had a great conversation with Andrew Treloar, David Groenewegen and Paul Bonnington that ranged from approaches to data and the latest on ANDS to internet TV. Finally, I got the chance to catch up over dinner with Andy Richards and Neil Geddes from the National Grid Service. As always in these events, one of the main reasons for us to attend is to meet up with those who are out practising eResearch so I spent quite a lot of time on the stand on Tuesday. It proved to be a great opportunity to catch up with some of my more recent projects so thanks to Tom Jackson from iREAD, Pete Burnap from SPIDER and Stephen Booth from Grid-SAFE for popping in and catching up.
I also had an interesting conversation with Andrew Cormack on PII (Personally Identifiable Information). Andrew’s point was that most applications simply don’t need to ship PII and I would agree. I think it’s often used as a comfort blanket but it’s a comfort blanket that carries its own risks. If SPs (or RPs if you prefer that term) were to adhere to Kim Cameron’s second law (minimal disclosure for a constrained use) from his Laws of Identity then the world would be a better place. This brought us to an interesting case of what happens with grid computing. It’s one of the few cases where you cannot get around issuing PII because you need to have a way of contacting the user in case their job fails or if it’s not going as intended. However, it still adheres to Kim’s second law in that there is only the need to get a contact address for the user.
Finally, I talked with Richard Sinnott and David Medyckyj-Scott on geo data and access to more complex data sets. Richard has a long history of complex access to data sets, particularly around medical data and using roles to determine who can access what. I think we are reaching a stage where we can start moving towards a broader rollout of the technologies so that they become more ubiquitous and it is hopefully something we can build on top of Richard’s work and that of the data access projects we are currently running. On the geo side, we are already running quite a few geo projects and I can see that location is going to prove to be increasingly important for research data and collaboration. One of the initiatives that David is very much interested in is INSPIRE, a European directive to create a spatial data infrastructure in Europe. I think INSPIRE is going to prove important over the next few years as it will help make spatial data easier to access and also provide an incentive to talk about spatial data in a common way.
POSTSCRIPT - This has been a long time in gestation as I’ve tried to get my notes down to a reasonable size for a blog post, which reflects just how much material there is at All Hands, making it a very worthwhile event to attend if you are involved in research and want to find new and better ways of doing research.
Less of the XML
I’m sitting in another conference where I’ve seen several presentations that are littered with XML that is then dissected ad nauseam. Now, I’m sure that they are very valuable for the people who are presenting them and we’re all familiar with the pride with which we talk about our new ‘baby’. Unfortunately, it switches off the bulk of the audience (I’m not just talking about myself, btw - there are several people who feel the same way). So, if you’re a developer or technical manager then please resist the temptation to put XML in your presentation. Diagrams to show how your system works are good (animated ones even better). Short, concise slides that outline where your solution could be used and how it helps the user are good. Short demonstrations of your system working are good. Sharing all that lot on a site like SlideShare or on a website (which is what we do at JISC) is even better.
If you do this then you avoid the demoralising prospect of people switching off from what you are presenting altogether (and, yes, this even applies to technical people). If someone wants to see exactly what is in the XML you output or take in then you can safely rest assured that they’ll ask you about it over coffee.