Developer Activities — The Repository Challenge

The Open Repositories conference annually attracts developers who working on a wide variety of repository-oriented platforms and projects from across the world. As well as providing a forum for discussion of the cutting edge of repository R&D, this year's conference will run a developers activity to produce new demos of novel repository capability. The aim is to get developers working in small teams to try to quickly pull together established platforms and services to demonstrate how to achieve real-life, user-relevant scenarios and services.

"The Repository Challenge" will be based around small teams of developers, trying to achieve goals set by the repository manager and user community. The main conference reception will host an awards ceremony celebrating the achievements of the teams. Cash prizes will be given to the best team demos (first prize £2,500 / $5,000 / €3.350 with additional cash prizes for second and third places and gifts for honorable mentions). Details of the judging criteria will be announced at the start of the conference.

The Repository Challenge will be run in an informal way. Facilities will be made available for teams to meet up, drink coffee or cola and eat pizza (BarCamp style), but there are no specific timetabled developer sessions to segregate the conference into 'managers' and 'developers'. Instead it is anticipated that everyone will attend the main conference sessions to listen to the talks that they find interesting and relevant, but during those talks managers will do their email and developers will hack :-)

We think this to be the first time ever that an effort has been made to get rapid cross-platform international development happening in the same place and at the same time with some of the best repository developers in the world!

The Repository Challenge is supported by the JISC CRIG (Common Repository Interface Group, set up to examine the boundaries between repositories and other systems) who recently met up at a Repository Unconference to get repository developers and managers to think and argue creatively about the future of repositories. The outputs of the unconference (photos of the flipcharts) are available for discussion and comment at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wocrig . The judging criteria for the cash prizes will be based on these flipcharts and ensuing discussion.

CRIG discussion is available via the following blog planet feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jisc-crig

An explanation of the CRIG group can be found at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/CRIG

Documentation and output from the Repository Challenge will be made available via the eFramework: http://www.e-framework.org/

For more information, please contact the Repository Challenge chair, David Flanders (d.flanders@bbk.ac.uk).