Just to give you a flavour of things zinging round my mind at the moment that I want to chat about with others coming to the Grad Centre on Friday are …
1) What do we feel about open source software; is this something we should be embracing, encouraging, supporting, developing?
2) What about services that we encourage users to adopt, ie drop.io – it’s been taken over by Facebook and the service closed down. Is this an argument for not using such services? How do we provide “support” for such “services”? What should be our reaction when such a “service” disappears?
3) Video services – I’ve come across VLC which is an open-source multimedia framework, player and server – it looks rather interesting. I think we ought to have a debate whether it should be something we would want to investigate.
Those are just three conversations I’d be interested in having with anyone joining me and having a cup of coffee – I won’t be paying for it though 🙂
I’ll be very pleased to discuss these topics! The open source question has come up a couple of times this week, and I’d be really interested in chatting about alternative models for support when it comes to using packages where the software and the support may come from different sources, and the kinds of resources for support that might be available (as a commercial deal from the developer, as a commercial deal from a third party, from “the community”, from other users ad-hoc – eg. partner institutions, etc.).