Scholarly publishing with WordPress

Joss Winn / / Blog

Working on the JISCPress project, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about scholarly publishing on the web, and in particular with WordPress. This morning, I read a post over on the ArchivePress blog about some WordPress plugins which are useful additions for creating a scholarly blog and it got me thinking a bit more about what features WordPress would need to support scholarly publishing.

JISCPress does away with the idea that WordPress is a blogging tool, and instead uses WordPress Multi-User as a document publishing platform, where one site or ‘blog’ is a document. The way WPMU is structured means that despite serving multiple (potentially millions) of document sites, the platform remains relatively ‘lightweight’ as each document site generates just a handful of additional database tables, while sharing the same administrative core as a single WordPress install. So, 100 WordPress blogs on WPMU is nothing like the equivalent of running 100 separate WordPress blogs, both from the point of resource requirements and administration. In fact, quite soon, there will be no such thing as WPMU as the two products are going to be merged and because they share 90%+ of the same code already, it’s not too difficult to achieve.1

Anyway, my point here is to discuss whether WordPress can be extended to accommodate most conventions found in scholarly publishing and where it is lacking, to identify the development work required to meet the needs of most academic who wish to write on and publish to the web.2

Scholarly publishing extends to a wide variety of published outputs. As a Content Management System (CMS) and technology development platform, I believe that WordPress has the potential to support any type of scholarly publishing that the web supports. It is extremely extensible, as can be seen from the 6000+ plugins that are available. However, what I’m interested in is what can be done now, by an academic wishing to publish their work through the use of WordPress acting as a CMS. What can be achieved with a few quid3 to self-host WordPress so that a few plugins can be installed and a well structured, typical, scholarly paper can be published.

My Dissertation

For some time, I’ve been meaning to publish my MA dissertation. Back in 2002, I undertook some unique research which has not, to my knowledge, been repeated and I think there is some value in having it easily accessible on the web. I have an OpenOffice file and a PDF and, in the course of a morning, have published it under my own domain. The reason I did not publish it on the university WPMU platform is because I have been experimenting with different plugins and did not want to install plugins that were untested or we may not support long-term.  In this case, I’ve used a single WordPress installation, but ideally an individual researcher, group of researchers or research institution, would run a WPMU installation which allowed multiple documents to be authored individually or collaboratively4 and published directly to the web as XHTML.

BuddyPress, by the way, can make the experience even more natural, not only because it is based around a community of like-minded people writing together  on the same web publishing platform, but also because, with a few tweaks here and there, we can move away from the language of blogs and towards the language of documents.


BuddyPress admin bar

Profile menu

Enough of BuddyPress on WPMU for now and back to my dissertation. I set up the site in ten minutes, without using FTP or a command line because I use a host that provides a one-click install of WordPress and WordPress allows you to search for and install plugins from its Dashboard, rather than having to use FTP. Once the site was installed, I then  made some basic changes to the settings, turning on XML-RPC and AtomPub, so that, if I decided to, I could publish to the site using my Word Processor.5 I didn’t use this in the end, but trust me, it works very well using recent versions of MS Word, Open Office (free) and other blogging clients such as MS Live Writer (free).

So, what are the common characteristics of an academic paper? What does WordPress have to support to provide functionality that meets most scholars’ publishing requirements? I scratched my head (and asked on Twitter) and came up with the following:

  • footnotes/endnotes
  • citations
  • use of LaTeX (sciences)
  • tables
  • images
  • bibliography
  • sub-headings
  • annexes
  • appendices
  • dedication
  • abstract
  • table of contents
  • index to figures
  • introduction
  • exposition
  • conclusion

Many of these are supported in WordPress by default and don’t require any additional plugins (tables, images, sub-headings, annexes, appendices, dedication, abstract, introduction, exposition, conclusion, are all either basic literary conventions or just part of a simply structured document).

For additional support, I installed digress.it, which we have funded through the JISCPress project. This is a WordPress plugin which allows readers to comment on the paragraphs of a document, rather than at the document section level. We’re adding a lot more functionality to meet the objectives of the JISCPress project, but I chose digress.it, principally for the reason that it is designed to turn a WordPress blog into a document site. I could have used any other WordPress theme, but digress.it automatically creates a Table of Contents and allows you to re-order WordPress posts when they are read so that you don’t have to author your document in reverse or adjust the publication dates so the document sections appear in the correct order.

My dissertaion published using digress.it

My dissertation published using digress.it

I added the abstract for my dissertation to the ‘about’ page, so it shows up on the front of the site. I also uploaded a PDF version so that people can download it directly. You’ll see that I also added some links to a related book and DVD, which will certainly appeal to people who are interested in my dissertation. The links pull an image and some basic metadata from Amazon, using the Amazon Machine Tags plugin. This could be used to link to the book in which your article is published and earn you money in click referrals. An alternative, would be the Open Book Book Data plugin, which retrieves a book cover and metadata from Open Library, where your book may already be catalogued. If it’s not on Open Library, catalogue it!

After setting this up, I installed a few more plugins:

Dublin Core for WordPress: Automatically adds ten Dublin Core metadata elements to the document mark up.

wp-footnotes: This allows you to easily add footnotes to your document by enclosing your footnote in double parentheses.6

OAI-ORE Resource Map: Automatically marks up the document sections with a OAI-ORE 1.0 resource map.

Google Analyticator: Adds Google Analytics support so you can collect statistics on the readership of your document.

WP Calais Archive Tagger: Analyses your entire document and automatically keywords each section, using the Open Calais API.

Search API: WordPress comes with search built in, but there is a new search API which will eventually make its way into the WordPress core. I’ve installed the plugin to provide full-text search across the document. It can also add Google Search to your document site.

wp-super-cache: This is simple to install and will significantly speed up your document site, making it a pleasure to navigate through and read :-)

Plugins I didn’t use

wp-latex: Although I didn’t need it for my dissertation, it’s worth noting that WordPress supports the use of \LaTeX.

Academic Citation: You need to add a line of code to your theme for this to display. It supports the concept of an article being a single blog post, rather than a ‘document site’ and displays a variety of citation formats for readers to use.

Do you know of any other plugins for a scholarly blog?

The Beauty of Feeds

The other useful thing about managing a document using WordPress and in particular, using digress.it, is that you automatically get RSS/Atom feeds for the document. I’ve already discussed these in detail. It means that I was able to read my document in my feed reader, with footnotes and images displayed correctly.

Document in Google Reader

See how nicely the formatting is preserved. \LaTeX is also rendered correctly in feed readers.

Document formatted nicely in Google Reader

Reading my dissertation in Google Reader

You’ll see that the document sections are listed in order; that is, first section on top. As I noted above, blogs list posts in reverse (most recent first), so I sorted the feed items in Yahoo Pipes and sorted it in ascending order. Yahoo Pipes exports as RSS and it’s that feed that I subscribed to in Google Reader. Wouldn’t it be nice, if I could import my document feed into an Institutional Repository? Wait a minute, I can! :-)

Importing an RSS feed into EPrints

Click to see the item in the repository

Click to see the item in the repository

When importing the default feed, the HTML output is accurate but in reverse order, while the RSS output from Yahoo Pipes didn’t import into EPrints very cleanly at all. I’ll work on this. UPDATE: Forget Yahoo Pipes. WordPress feeds can be sorted with a switch added to the URL: http://example.com/feed/?orderby=post_date&order=ASC

So there it is. An academic paper, published to the web using a modern CMS which supports most authoring and publishing requirements. I would favour an institutional WPMU platform for academics to author directly to, publish their pre-print to the web for open access and detailed comment, and import their RSS feed into the repository. As a proof of concept, I’m quite pleased with this. We are currently developing a widget that can be embedded in a web page or WordPress sidebar and allow a member of staff to upload a document or zipped folder of documents to the Institutional Repository. I wonder if we can also support the import of a feed from the widget, too?

So, what would your requirements be? Tell me and I’ll do my best to test WordPress against them.

  1. Has anyone done a diff on the two code bases to measure exactly what percentage of the code is shared between WP and WPMU?
  2. Actually, I think I’ll save the discussion of its shortfalls for my next post. This one is already long enough.
  3. I pay $5/year for my domain name and as many sub-domains as I need. I pay $10/month for my hosting with unlimited storage and bandwidth.
  4. Like any decent CMS, WordPress supports role-based authoring and editing and maintains a revision history of edits, auto-saved once per minute. Revisions can be compared alongside of each other.
  5. On a scholarly WPMU installation, plugins could be pre-installed and activated, a default theme selected and settings tweaked so very little work is required by the academic author prior to writing her document.
  6. I am using the plugin on this blog!

Related posts

Testing new site features with the Amazon Kindle License Agreement

psychemedia / / Blog

We’re really pleased to help promote the launch of digress.it, the evolution of CommentPress which WriteToReply uses to allow you to comment on document paragraphs.

We’ve been in touch with Eddie Tejeda, the original developer of CommentPress, since March, and have been working with him to find funding for a complete rewrite and re-release of the original CommentPress project. You can read more about digress.it on the community website, but here’s a run down of the new features, a bit of a roadmap for forthcoming features and a shout out to anyone that wants to get involved in the project.

New Features

The original features of CommentPress can be summarised as follows:

  • A Table of Contents
  • Paragraph-level URIs
  • Paragraph-level commenting
  • A scrolling comment box
  • Page filters that allow you to read comments by document section or by commenter

CommentPress was a WordPress theme. digress.it is a WordPress plugin and a complete rewrite of the original CommentPress code. It adds the following features:

Floating comment box. You can now resize and position the comment box anywhere on the page.

Threaded comments. Real discussion.

Highly configurable and accepts different stylesheets

RSS feeds for comment authors. Feeds for individual comment authors is a first for WordPress.

Paragraph embedding. You can embed a paragraph on your own site. Paragraphs content is available as HTML, JSON or TXT

Real-time onsite notifications. If someone else comments on a section you are reading, the comment box will ‘pulse’ to alert you.

There still be bugs. We’re still working on browser compatibility issues with the comment box, for example. This is a first release  using the version 2 codebase and we’d really appreciate your feedback from testing it by considering Amazon’s Kindle License Agreement. :-)

RoadMap

To achieve the objectives of the JISCPress project, we’ll be continuing to fund the refinement of digress.it until November.  The features we’re currently considering can be seen on our UserVoice page (please add more as you think of them). Here are some highlights, specific to digress.it:

  • Compatibility with IntenseDebate. This would provide a number of multimedia and reputational features.
  • Compatibility with PollDaddy. The ability to include polls in a document would be useful for consultations.
  • Paragraph and ‘comment here’ links in the RSS feed. Convenient if you read the document in your news reader or embed a feed elsewhere.
  • WCAG Accessibility. Required for use by the Public Sector.
  • Compatibility with XML-RPC clients for remote document authoring. Convenient for document authors to publish from MS Word, etc.

Content Transclusion: One Step Closer

psychemedia / / Blog

Following a brief exchange with @lesteph last night, I thought it might be worth making a quick post about the idea of content or document transclusion.

Simply put, transclusion refers to the inclusion, or embedding, of one document or resource in another. To a certain extent, whenever you embed an image or Youtube video in a page is a form of transclusion. (Actually, I’m not sure that’s strictly true? But it gets the point across…)

Whilst doing a little digging around for references to fill out this post, I came across a nicely worked example of transclusion from Wikipedia – Transclusion in Wikipedia

content transclusion in wikipedia

The idea? You can embed the content of any Wikipedia page in any other Wikipedia page. And presumably the same is true within any Mediawiki installation.

That is, in a MediaWiki wiki:

you can embed the content of any one page in any other page.

(I’m not sure if one MediaWiki installation can transclude content from any other MediaWiki installation? I assume it can???)

It’s also possible to include, (that is, transclude) MediaWiki content in a WordPress environment using the Wiki Inc plugin. A compelling demonstration of this is provided by Jim Groom, who has shown how to republish documentation authored in a Wiki via a WordPress page, an approach we adopted in our WriteToReply Digital Britain tinkerings.

One of the things we’ve started exploring the JISCPress project is the ability to publish each separate paragraph in a document (each with its own URI), in a variety of formats – txt, JSON, HTML, XML. That is, we have (or soon will have) an engine in place that supports the “publishing” side of paragraph level transclusion of content from reports published via the JISCPress/WTR platform. Now all we need is the transclusion (re-presentation of transcluded content) part to be able to transclude content from one document in another. (See Taking the Conversation Elsewhere – Embedded Quotes; see also Image Based Quotes from WriteToReply Using Kwout for a related mashup).

(Hmm, although Joss won’t like this, I do think we need a [WTR-include=REF] shortcode handler installed by default in WTR/JISCPress that will pull in paragraph level content in to one document from a document elsewhere on the local platform?)

Now this is really what hypertext is about – URIs (that is, links), that can act as a portal that can pull content in to one location from another. It may be of course that the idea of textual transclusion is just too confusing for people. But it’s something we’re going to explore with WriteToReply.

And on of the things we’re looking at for both WriteToReply and JISCPress is the use of semantic tagging to automatically annotate parts of the document (at the paragraph level, if possible?) so that content on a particular topic (i.e. tagged in a particular way) in one document can be automatically transcluded in – or alongside – a related paragraph in a separate document. (Hmm – maybe we need a ‘related paragraphs’ panel, cf. the comments panel, that can display transcluded, related paragraphs, from elsewhere in the document or from other documents?)

PS If you have an hour, here’s the venerable Ted Nelson giving a Google Tech Talk on the topic of transclusion:

Enjoy…

PPS here’s an old library that provides a more general case framework for content transclusion: Purple Include. I’m not sure if it still works though?

PPPS Here’s the scarey W3C take on linking and transclusion 😉 This is also interesting: auto/embed is not node transclusion

PPPPS for another take on including content by reference, see Email By Reference, Not By Value, or “how I came up with the idea for Google Wave first”;-)

PPPPPS Seems like eprints may also support transclusion… E-prints – VLit Transclusion Support.

Image Based Quotes from WriteToReply Using Kwout

psychemedia / / Blog

One of the things we discussed with respect to embedding WriteToReply/JISCPress quotes in third party applications was whether or not we should support an “imagified” embedding – that is, convert a paragraph to a JPG or PNG image format that can then be easily embedded in the third party site.

The advantage? Even if the third party site disallows script, object or embed tags, it will probably allow img tags…

So for example, extending the range of output formats suggested in Taking the Conversation Elsewhere – Embedded Quotes, we might consider something like an &output=png switch that allows us to construct an image embedding code along the lines of:

<img src=”http://docserver.example.com?p=POSTNUMBER&digress-embed=PARANUMBER&output=png” longdesc=”http://docserver.example.com?p=POSTNUMBER&digress-embed=PARANUMBER”>

Once again, there’s a trackback issue, although it’s easy enough to wrap the image tag in an appropriate anchor tag:

<a href=”http://docserver.example.com?p=POSTNUMBER&para=PARANUMBER”><img src=”http://docserver.example.com?p=POSTNUMBER&digress-embed=PARANUMBER&output=png” longdesc=”http://docserver.example.com?p=POSTNUMBER&digress-embed=PARANUMBER”></a>

However, this facility was seen as non-essential, so I looked on the web for a solution – and found it in the form of the kwout API which can be used to generate an image based representation of text found in a specified div tag (by ID) on a given web page, which can then in turn be embedded in an arbitrary web page. Although the image may be hard to read, this can work to our advantage: it might drive traffic back to the site that originated the quote :-)

The following javascript snippet uses the Kwwout API to generate an image based representation of a single paragraph from a WriteToReply republished document:

javascript:window.location=’http://kwout.com/grab?address=’+encodeURIComponent(“http://writetoreply.org/pluralnews/2009/07/03/section-1-securing-plural-sources-of-news-in-the-nations-locally-and-in-the-regions/”)+’&block=contentblock_10′

In the API call, “contentblock_10″ is the id of the block element to be quoted. Here’s what the kwouted image looks like:

kwouting a paragrpah from writetoreply http://kwout.com/quote/nbj4nife

And here’s the original paragraph on WriteToReply:

http://writetoreply.org/pluralnews/2009/07/03/section-1-securing-plural-sources-of-news-in-the-nations-locally-and-in-the-regions/#10 Writetoreply orginal quote

Note that the link that the kwout script generates is back to the page in the above case, so to link back to the actual paragraph we’d need to specify this in the link:

javascript:window.location=’http://kwout.com/grab?address=’+encodeURIComponent(“http://writetoreply.org/pluralnews/2009/07/03/section-1-securing-plural-sources-of-news-in-the-nations-locally-and-in-the-regions/#10“)+’&block=contentblock_10′

As a step on the road to full integration (a use of the Kwout API which may or may not be in line with the stated terms and conditions? I don’t know, I haven’t read them…!) is this bookmarklet that should let you highlight a paragraph number on a WriteToReply document, and then take you straight to the Kwout embed page for that paragraph:

javascript:(function(){var l=location.href; window.location=’http://kwout.com/grab?address=’+encodeURIComponent(l)+’&block=contentblock_’+window.getSelection();})()

Actually, that looks a little cluttered, and the usability is a little off. So a better solution maybe to suggest that the user clicks on the paragraph link to get the “paragraph in focus page” page, and then click on the following bookmarklet:

javascript:(function(){var l=location.href;l=l.split(‘#’);window.location=’http://kwout.com/grab?address=’+encodeURIComponent(l[0])+’&block=contentblock_’+l[1];})()

(What this does is pull the paragraph identifier out of the URI and then construct the Kwout API call out of it as a result.)

Or if you want the link to go to the “paragraph in focus” page, rather than the top of the page:

javascript:(function(){var l=location.href;window.location=’http://kwout.com/grab?address=’+encodeURIComponent(l)+’&block=contentblock_’+l.split(‘#’)[1];})()

(Note that neither of these bookmarklets is ideal – a production stable bookmarklet should be able to cope (or fail gracefully) with the lack of hash separated paragraph identifier in the URI.)

Hmm, maybe we need a “labs” area on WriteToReply where we can collect these micro-utilities?

Taking the Conversation Elsewhere – Embedded Quotes

psychemedia / / Blog

As part of the JISCPress effort, one of the things we’ve been considering is the granularity of appropriate “consultation elements” or “discussion elements”, those pieces of content that people might actually want to reference, question or chat around as compared to a whole 200 page document, for example.

The page and paragraph levels fall out of the CommentPress theme (and its descendants) quite naturally – WordPress gives us the page level (along with a single item RSS feed at the page level), and the theme gives us URIs at the paragraph level.

(Hmmm… I wonder – would it also be useful to provide a multi-item RSS feed, at the page level, with a separate item for each paragraph on that page? Or do we do that already?!)

In many cases, the paragraph level seems to be the most natural chunk for discussion, particularly in an ongoing conversation about a particular document. So a major question for us is how to put those paragraphs to work?

One of the features that Eddie’s been working on as part of the JISCPress project is the ability to embed paragraphs from a document in third party web page. This feature will allow us to increase the surface area of the document by allowing third parties to re-present that content elsewhere, whilst also (hopefully) providing a means to link that external conversation directly back to the original document.

So what benefits does embedding have to offer to:

a) the person grabbing and using the embed code;
b) the publisher/whoever’s running the consultation from which the embed code was grabbed

In a discussion on the JISCPress group, Joss suggested the following:

For the user:

1. More portable transformation of document content into raw data.
2. Personalisation, presentation and ‘ownership’ of documents within their own publishing environment (which is one of the benefits of slideshare/scribd).
3. Direct joined up quoting rather than copying. More aligned with the ideals of the web and linking data. This could also be a benefit to publishers concerned about unattributed copying.

For the publisher:

1. Greater possibilities of content dissemination
2. Greater potential of attracting engagement via trackbacks
3. Further possibility of using JISCPress as an underlying ‘document store’ where authoring, dissemination and engagement occurs mostly remotely via XML-RPC, syndication, embeds and trackbacks.
4. Possibility of site analytics being hooked into embeds so the reach is measurable???? (Analytics can track document types, I’m not sure whether they are used to track embeds…)

So where are we at? Embedding is currently in testing and has the following mechanic. Hovering your mouse cursor over one of the paragraph numbers in a document raises a floating panel that contains a link to the current paragraph, and an embed code. (The panel remains open whilst the cursor is over it, so you can easily grab a copy of the code.)

Embedding in digress.it

Using the embed code in a third party page embeds the corresponding paragraph in that page.

For testing purposes, the pattern we are using for the embed URL is of the form:

http://docserver.example.com?p=POSTNUMBER&digress-embed=PARANUMBER

The POSTNUMBER identifies the actual page (i.e. http://docserver.example.com?p=POSTNUMBER is a valid page URI) and the PARANUMBER identifies the paragraph to be embedded. Note that this is subject to change.

Unfortunately, the simple embed strategy does not trivially generate a linkback (such as a trackback or pingback) to the original document. For these reverse links to be generated automatically, an actual anchor tag linking back to the original page must be present in the page creating the linkback. One commonly used strategy for achieving this is to provide an embed code of the form:

<div>
<object /&gt
<a>Quoted from etc…</a>
</div>

That is, a link is explicitly included in the embed code, although it is easy enough for the person embedding the quote to strip that anchor tag out.

(Although it complicates matters, as the embedded object is being pulled from the document server, I guess that means we could, in principle, generate a linkback by observing the referrer page URIs for requests made on the server for particular embeddable objects and checking those against the current list of trackbacks? Or maybe the embedded object could generate an XML-RPC back to the trackback server itself whenever the page it is embedded in is loaded? [Note to self: can we easily get analytics on third party embeds?] I think Eddie is working on this, so I won’t embarrass myself further wittering on about things I don’t know anything about!;-)

Note that a similar problem arises when using a Javascript (<script> tag) based embed code: there is no explicit anchor link present. Script tags also have the additional problem that they are often sanitised (i.e. stripped out) of web pages in many institutional web publishing systems. (In some circumstances, a workaround for the institutional case may be possible. For example, if a variant of WTR/JISCPress was running as a white label solution in an institution, a shortcode plugin could be provided that allowed authors to embed paragraphs from documents in that environment within other documents in that environment. See the WordPress shortcode API for more details.)

As well as the straightforward embed code, we’ve also been considering other ways in which paragraph level content can be published so that third parties have convenient access to it in a format that is appropriate for their needs.

And this is what we came up with – an output switch that can be appended to the end of a paragraph URI that allows the paragraph level content to be published in a variety of formats:

  • &output=html
  • &output=rss
  • &output=txt
  • &output=js
  • &output=json

As and when these come on stream, we’ll publish use-case examples for each of them.

If you have any comments on our “paragraph republishing” strategy, please post a comment below.

I’ve just upgraded jiscpress.org to WPM…

Joss Winn / / Microblog

I’ve just upgraded jiscpress.org to WPMU 2.8.1 beta. It’s plenty stable enough to develop from and uses a new widget framework, among other changes. It’s sync’d with WP 2.8.1 and you can read about changes in WP 2.8 here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8 It’s likely that v2.8.x will be around for most if not all of the JISCPress project but we should keep an eye on v2.9 development to ensure that JISCPress remains compatible with changes in core. http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.9

Agile methodologies and open source development

Joss Winn / / Blog

In the course of writing the JISCPress Project Plan, I’ve been thinking again about our project methodology. The original funding call asked for projects to adopt an agile methodology like SCRUM or XP, which I am familiar with. We attempted to use XP while I was working at Amnesty International (not long after half the IT department were trained in Prince2!) and like any methodology, it was used in part rather than in whole. We  collected user stories, held five minute stand up meetings each day and released often and iteratively so that users could feed back on the product. ((It may look like an empty repository but over 20,000 assets are available to logged in Amnesty staff.))

The JISCPress project has four team members, including myself. None of us work on JISCPress full-time, having other work and study commitments. Equally, none of us work together in the same department and only Alex and I work in the same university. Alex is a student of computing at Lincoln, Tony lives on the Isle of Wight and Eddie lives in San Francisco. In addition to this, we’re working wholly with existing open source software (WordPress) that is openly developed and it has never been an option in my mind, to enjoy the benefits of that community but not attempt to contribute back using the same transparency of process. It was also proposed in our funding bid that “the project will seek to promote openness and collaboration from the point of bid announcements onwards.” By this, I was thinking in terms of the open source development process I have seen with WordPress and other projects where asynchronous discussion and contributions take place through mailing lists, IRC, a code repository, issue tracker and a wiki.

Reading the excellent OSS Watch website, I came across a page about the sustainability of projects and open development, and was particularly interested to read a quote from Gianugo Rabellino, CEO of SourceSense:

“If you think that one of the key ideas of agile is the unity of time and location – you need to be in the same place at the same time and doing a lot of discussion face-to-face – and then you have open development which is based on asynchronous, distributed working etc., then it looks like oil and water – they don’t mix”.

This is what I’ve been thinking recently, too. It’s not that they are wholly incompatible methods of developing software, but from what I know about agile methods, there is an assumption that the developers are working together in the same physical location, focused intensively on the same client driven product.

“Scrum enables the creation of self-organizing teams by encouraging colocation of all team members, and verbal communication across all team members and disciplines that are involved in the project.” ((Wikipedia: SCRUM))

Frankly, this way of working is impossible for us. On the other hand, projects that are openly developed often don’t have clients but instead have ‘communities’ of users. They rarely have short code sprints, they have open version-controlled repositories that allow anyone to test the code at any time. It’s worth noting that WordPress recently held a code sprint but given the size of the community, there were relatively few contributions. Many contributors work asynchronously and have other commitments over the course of their day, volunteering their time and effort when they can.

Likewise, JISCPress is intended to serve a community rather than a single client. We hope that it is the JISC community who lead the direction of the project through testing and feedback and who eventually benefit the most from the project. Beyond the JISC community, there is the wider community of users of WordPress and CommentPress who will likewise benefit from the project.

Ross Gardler, OSS Watch manager, describes the Open Development Methodology (ODM) as “a way for distributed team members to collaboratively develop a shared resource in a managed and sustainable way.” The ODM is characterised by:

  1. User engagement
  2. Transparency
  3. Collaboration
  4. Agility
  5. Sustainability

Agility and user engagement are also found in SCRUM and XP, but there is no requirement in these methodologies to be transparent, sustainable beyond the client’s specific use for the product or cater for a diverse group of asynchronous contributors.

With this in mind, I will continue to learn about and pursue an open development methodology for JISCPress because it is appropriate for our project. It is already part of an existing (WordPress) open development community and we have, from the start of WriteToReply and then the #jiscri call, placed a great deal of emphasis on openness and transparency of process.

It is too early in the project to measure the effectiveness of this approach. Eddie and Alex only joined us in the last few days and we’re still setting up the basic platform for working with. I have noticed that the use of IRC has not taken off despite my fondness for it. This is partly because all of us use GMail and tend to use Google Chat for quick conversations when we see we’re online at the same time, rather than having an IRC client open. Tony and I have an established way of communicating with each other over Twitter, which is public but a poor method of establishing context for the project as Twitter doesn’t archive tweets long-term and searching for anything seems to be hit and miss. I would like to establish weekly IRC meetings soon though. There is also the issue of working in a significantly different timezone to Eddie. IRC is for synchronous chat and when Eddie is at work,the rest of us are thinking of sleep. Eddie is talking about visiting the UK for a few days (paid for out of his own pocket), and I hope that the four of us and anyone else that is interested, will meet up for a day’s discussion and development.

There are clearly still things to be worked out and a routine to establish that works best for us, but I am keen that if a methodology is to be identified for the project, it is one of ‘open development’ rather than ‘agile’. I intend to devote a lot of my time on the project to ensuring that the wider WordPress community are aware of what we are doing and that they are welcome to contribute in any way they can. I shall write more about how we are addressing Ross’ five characteristics of an Open Development Methodology and am keen hear from anyone who has an opinion on any of this, including members of the JISCPress team, who I haven’t consulted before writing any of this.