The projects I have been undertaking in the past 25 years or so span theoretical research, software development, policy, implementation and practice. Much is experimental and might not be realized as a product, but in seeking practical benefit, I try to retain what I’ve learnt as it may yet have some application later on. Many problems are recurrent and the approaches (and insights) may be similar at each iteration, albeit with different tools.

My main role has been as a problem solver / developer for/of web applications, mainly for the public sector, in both staff and consultancy roles. At a university, ‘off the shelf’ products are seldom sufficient out of the box: there is usually a considerable amount of customisation required, which motivates in-house solutions.  Thus, I have worked individually and in small teams, particularly the (now closed) Academic Computing Development Team, allowing me to undertake bespoke full-stack development; wherever possible this is in accordance with open standards and using open source components (in the early days, CGI/Perl and then PHP, connecting to SQL databases; then XML and XSLT). These standards underpin the software I am currently developing. Nowadays, apart from Sigala, my development is oriented to customisations of popular systems such as WordPress.  

Whilst most of my experience of development has been small-scale, I have also been heavily involved in an institutional project – WebLearn, Oxford University’s first virtual learning environment, for which I was involved in the procurement and subsequently was responsible for the operational management when it became a centrally-hosted production service. After a while, this involved crunching through tens of millions of event log database rows to generate summary usage figures.

I have also coordinated and managed a few projects, including RAMBLE and, more recently, digital asset management at the History of Science Museum.

For details of past projects, please consult my portfolio. Here, I only highlight the start of current work.

Sigala Research Knowledge Basis (2020-)

Problem

The Sigala project concerns the research, design and development of software systems to support sustainable social networking. There is a substantial body of theory underpinning the software development, but it’s been built up sporadically, initially documented in MS Word, with a few blog posts and the occasional presentation.

To put the research on a more solid footing is a project in itself; it needs to be maintained and disseminated more sustainably, whilst making it easier to manage.  The form in which the research is shared needs to be convenient.

Solution

The references are being managed in Zotero, which not only supports bibliographic standards for records management and import/export, but also has a web-mediated infrastructure that supports shared working.

For dissemination, a WordPress site has been created locally and content migrated from the Word documents.  A workflow enables convenient deployment of a static site on a remote server along with a zip archive of almost identical content.  For added convenience, a WordPress plugin, WP Static Search (based on Lunr.js), has been extended to enable offline searches. Both of these software components will be released as open source software.

URL: https://research.siga.la/