A wonderful summary of what is going on and a great expose of how new technologies are being used

He also mentions the portal/wiki that has been developed for the programme that he runs at Kansas SU which seems a fantastic tool for his study programme - how great would it have been to have had something similar a thousand years ago when I studied

The thing which struck me was the richness of the particular examples contained within projects, and how directly they can speak before we ‘JISCify’ them and squeeze the humanity out of them. The short video clips of students and their technology experiences were excellence and should help ground us in an area that gets a little too grand for itself at times.

For me, a range of recent experiences are strengthening the view that we at JISC need to be better at telling stories in order to get our point across - sometime when we do this such as in the eFramework and Access Management animations, it can be revelatory. How good would it be to have more of this sort of approach (though hopefully not too many bandwagon-jumping animations) to shed light on the arcane world of Business and Community Engagement, say, or other area of work like the Information Environment and so forth

Well although I wasn’t able to stay until the bitter end I should sum up my experience of this TNC.

Bruges (Brugge) is indeed a lovely city worthy of its reputation as a beautiful place and well worth the visit. Despite the inevitable hordes of tourists it still manages to remain chilled.

The TF-PR meeting was OK but frankly the idea of trying to organise a task force meeting at the same time as the TNC, needs reviewing – there isn’t enough time in one meeting, minds are focussed elsewhere and it doesn’t really work without some significant change.

The TNC itself, despite session titles that promise interesting topics, still reverts to type pretty quickly with mad techies talking madness (from my perspective anyhow) I suspect that there are many other too who feel this – for instance the TF-PR members.

Next time I would like to see the TF-PR still meet around the TNC event but build a series of smaller meeting and discussions throughout the TNC so that we can get some marketing discussions underway and still benefit from the few TNC sessions that really make sense to us

Anyhow – one success was dinner at a little restaurant called De Bottelier where we have a really good meal, some decent wine all for a good price. De Bottelier can be found at Sint – Jakobsstraat 63 in Brugge, , restaurant@debottelier.com or call on +50 33.18.60.

(OK the photo is not the restaurant but a cutetsy (sp?) little place in some back street somewhere)

Jonathon Taylor –CISCO of excellence of virtual works and education

David Wortley – Serious Games Institute, Coventry University

Mr Cisco gave a recap of web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 where web 3.0 represents a totally personalisable environment and the slides for the session can be found here.

The Coventry speaker made the point that what is predictable is that things are not predictable in terms of how new technology is used . This does lead to difficulties in getting audience attention; a member of generation Y or a digital native views education in a totally different way to previously - converging technologies are changing the learning process and the learners themselves

We are moving from a knowledge transfer model in education towards peer to peer, anytime, anywhere learning

Coventry is trying to combine real and virtual worlds e.g. linking a construction company to virtual environments to explore new approaches – currently generating energy savings for construction projects; as they can use virtual environments to create hybrid events – both real and virtual events

Mobile devices starting to hold multiple amounts of detail about us individually and these will be come increasingly important

Three things that make these ventures succeed according to Coventry:

o Technology to facilitate tracking and mapping

o Overcoming the emotional aspect of dealing with virtual environments

o Issues to do with concerns about privacy

Enrique de la Hoz - University of Alcala de Henares

His slides can be found on the Terena web site. The abstract for the session went as follows:

“In the last years, the interest about the video streaming over Internet has been increasing. There are some solutions based on open code that provide a good performance. Some of them has been tested during the last two years over the university campus network and after that it has been taken the decision of using a new system that increase the compatibility with the receiver platforms using RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) and Flash Video to allow the conditional access to the contents based on user cryptographic credentials stored into a “cryptographic token” (USB device with hardware oriented cryptographic algorithms). ” - there , that told you didn’t it…

Problems with video in web have been about bandwidth, lack of common video formats, no standard delivery standards and users get lost in a multiplicity of formats

The arrival of Youtube introduced new ways if interaction with video content introducing a de facto standard based on flash technology, RTMP protocol etc This means that the flash payer plug is all that is needed and any device using this is able to play content. But there are still some problems – it is a proprietary scheme, there is no RTMP open specification and some of the codec as not free. This makes open source developments difficult. Adobe recently released a new version with RTMPE specification.. But there is still no consensus about DRM (digital rights management), it is not standards based.

‘They’ found three open source offers to develop an opens source flash player including Gnash, Open Source Flash Server has some disadvantages that restricts its use as video streamer.

They decided to build a solution that binds together a range of technological solutions most of which sounded like Sanskrit to me unfortunately…

Opening Plenary

Paul van Binst - Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Unfortunately despite the obvious enthusiasm of Mr van Binst it proved difficult in the overview room to follow his presentation closely - partly due to his charming but dense linguistic accent and partly because the streaming showed him but not the slides that he was referring to throughout his presentation. Still here is pretty photo of an apparently important building in Bruges …

SURFNET - Netherlands

Currently product managers are responsible for marketing their services including marketing mix, budgets, encouraging take up etc. Have more recently coordinated comms and marketing work to help consolidate calendars of activity and scheduling.

They are trying to address questions of when in the life cycle comms should be included and what sort of marketing should be considered

ARNES – Slovenia

General attitude has been that they are not selling anything and so they don’t need marketing and anyhow it’s somehow an unclean activity. ARNES only used to appear in the press if there was a major problem. The strategy was more like ‘if we do a good job someone will notice’, and the notion of a strategy form marketing was seen as alien. The result has been that they got some feedback that wasn’t too bad, they have friendly but not professional relations with users and after 16 years they thought that their users still liked them.

But this approach doesn’t scale so ARNES is only in contact with a fraction of its users, they know very little about their users. They became aware that marketing costs and it is difficult to allocate resources and budgets. They currently only have 8000 euros pa (excluding the annual conference)

So they now need to combine the personal touch of the previous approach with some efficient but low costs marketing activity. ARNES now trying t cover some marketing basics within the constraints that they have.

JANET – Russell Nelson

There are three stages of how marketing takes place in an NREN – one person does it, a team does it, everyone does it. There are also two stages on the sales path - either simply providing the information – shouting at the customer, and secondly trying to persuade people why they might use a service.

There is a real need for NRENs to look beyond the immediate confines of their products and ensure that their customers have a real need for it – e.g JANETRoaming in UK where only 87 out of 1000 connected users subscribe to JANETRoaming

Marketing must be embedded into the business process to enable proper planning. Top 5 things successful in JANET include brand guidelines (identity and policy), editorial control (but there are real problems for web control), website development, PR Agency, awards.

Things that haven’t worked so well include: internal balance (how well comms are taken on board elsewhere in the organisation),

Next steps for JANET include market research and web 2.0 activities.

John Dyer of Terena prepared a discussion document to help answer the question -”What Have NREN’s Done for Us” - or something similar…

Document was started to try and pre-empt any questions about why NREN’s should not exist. In essence the current document covers the following areas:

Historically in 70’s not much was going in, 80’s there were some modest projects, in ‘85 there were 8 Europena NRENS, in 1990 there were 15 NRENS, and now in 2008 there are lots of high quality cutting edge systems. NRENS fulfil a need not met by ISP’s and there is evidence that networks are an essential part of the scientific environment

NRENS offer technological advantages that include – pioneering development, offering multi domain end to end services, facilitating confederations of trusted federations, are able to undertake large scale applied research, and they can stimulate innovation (but depends upon NREN philosophy)

There are also economic and social advantages – NRENs are part of the community they serve, they work to address the digital/geographical divides, they offer benefits of collective procurement, they represent solidarity – fair balance of cast sharing, affiliation to a large respected group, valuable national asset – independent and knowledgeable

What are the possible threats to NREN’s? – funding bodies feel that services can be provided through commercial routes, NREN’s may be thought to distort the market through government subsidies, commercial ISPs might evolve to offer identical services to NREN’s – or something else…

However NREN’s do currently fill a niche not supported by ISP’s and they should continue to do so. They should get closer relationships with the community, they should anticipate change, keep aware of commercial developments , and ….

At risk of sounding like a grumpy old git I am far from convinced that the idea of a joint TF (tasks force) meeting is likely to yield much of substance or consequence. The PR group has taken a long time to get going itself and so the prospect of lining with another group fills me with dread… but as I said, I am a grumpy old git…

Maria Ristok gave a good overview of the TF-PR groups work

Alberto Gomez from Red.Iris gave the TF-PMG overview . The group tries to deal with the dilemma of services needing both to deliver to the customer expectations and be innovative and ‘cutting edge’. The problem that this task force faces is the struggle against engineers wanting to put out new capabilities without adequately covering basic new service preparations. Group is concerned with Boston matrix issues and service portfolio and lifecycle management.

When group was TF-LCPM – four areas of work were Service Portfolios, Comparison of SLA’s, Exchange of Ideas on delivering services, portfolio management and life cycle models and tools