Project Organisation
Roles of the core project team are illustrated in the diagram below.
Figure 1: project roles
Professor Mark Stiles directed the project. Vicki Watkin managed the project. Sam Rowley managed the technical development of the project and took over as Project Manager when Vicki left the project. Professor Tony Toole managed the work at WeTN and Dr Greg McClure acted in a consultant role for the project and managed NIIMLE involvement.
At SURF, the project reported to Staffordshire University’s Information Services Senior Management Team and the SURF Management Board. Information Services contributed effort from other internal teams as the project work formed part of core strategy. At the two SURF partners, the work was led by staff who had considerable experience of working with the University on JISC projects. The SURF development team was based at Staffordshire University.
Staffordshire University led the work on Shibboleth. Project funding was used to appoint staff who effectively “bought-out” experienced staff, whilst also contributing to the project. SURF was responsible for pulling together and submitting project reports for JISC.
At WeTN, the project reported to the National Coordination Committee. The project work was planned to happen in parallel with the WeTN on-line foundation degree development which was due for completion at the end of 2005. The WeTN project team were based at Coleg Sir Gâr.
NIIMLE’s role was as a “providing” partner in terms of supporting the other two partners in their use and further development of the NIIMLE outputs.
During the course of SUNIWE, the NIIMLE project was discontinued. The NIIMLE outputs were subsequently managed by Queens University Belfast (QUB) where NIIMLE was based and Greg McClure continued to work. An agreement with QUB was made to ensure continued participation of Greg in the project.
Consortium Agreements
A Consortium Agreement was required to establish the rules for managing the project. The consortium agreement outlines institutional rights and obligations, ownership of existing and newly created intellectual property and arrangements for operational, technical and financial management. The consortium agreement underpins the work of the project and should be in place from the start of the project. All SUNIWE partners agreed a commitment to full and open sharing of all work done, and that all source code produced would be open source. Should any content be produced this would also be made freely available. Even with this commitment, the creation of the agreement was still a laborious and time-consuming process. The summary below encapsulates months of effort. Our recommendation to other projects would be to start work on the agreement as early as possible in the project.
A consortium agreement would usually take the form of an agreement between institutions involved in a project. In the case of SUNIWE, each partner in the project was a consortium and each of the consortia had existing local agreements which predated the SUNIWE project.
The three consortia had existing copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) agreements, but it was recognized that weaknesses in the agreements existed that needed to be addressed. Despite weaknesses in the agreements, all three consortia had operated successfully on their own projects and the problems to be addressed were more about formalising existing practice than the introduction of new practice.
The project team worked with Andrew Charlesworth to review the existing consortium agreements for SURF and WETN. It was decided that a “joining agreement”, including copyright and IPR issues, could be covered by memoranda of understanding as the existing WETN and SURF agreements were sufficiently robust.
Outputs
For the purposes of SUNIWE a principle of making all outputs freely available was adopted. This was implemented using Creative Commons for documentary outputs and Open Source licensing for software.
NIMLE source code was licenced using a BSD style licence (code is available to anyone who wants it; providing that the authors are acknowledge when used). It was decided the same type of licensing would be appropriate for SUNIWE outputs.
Data Protection
In addition to the copyright and IPR issues covered in the consortium agreements, the sensitive nature of the information being used in the portal required that a data protection agreement be produced. The data protection agreement covered the processing of data during the portal pilot and involved even more effort than the consortium agreements. Creation of the data protection agreement is outlined in the data protection section.