IWMW 2008: sack your web services team now
July 20th, 2008 by 
Phil
Actually, please don’t do that, I’ll have to get off my bum and look for another job.
It is, however, part of the conversation I’ll be having in my parallel session titled “What’s the Point of having Developers in a Web 2.0 World?” at IWMW 2008 in Aberdeen next week.
Self-promotion over, back to your jobs people (while you still have them!).
Tagged: iwmw iwmw2008 | 
4 Comments »
Hey Phil,
Interesting question, hopefully you’ll be posting some conclusions on the topic after the event! I guess each institution’s developers will end up being utilised customising services to add features needed by that institution – maybe that way, for example, we could rid ourselves of misspellings such as “insitution” in workshop abstracts submitted for conferences?
/me ducks
Rob
Posted by Rob Oxspring on July 20th, 2008 at 9:04 pmWe can only hope
I suspect the conclusions will be along the lines of: “be honest about what you don’t need to do”, “focus on what makes you different from commercial software” and “communicate better”.
To relate that to the typo: the interesting point of course is that everything is DIY until a 3rd-party competitor comes along which can do a better job. In the case of IWMW I’d recommend using http://www.expectnation.com/ next year rather than writing all their HTML by hand (which is what they do at the moment).
Posted by Phil on July 20th, 2008 at 10:19 pmYour question’s a good and timely one: when kids can run through a WordPress install some would believe you’re naturally twiddling your thumbs now the institutional web’s ‘done’.
New buy-ins tend to increase our workload, and that’s when they’ve been a success. Evolving requirements and user uptake, training, maintenance (and building cool stuff on top) all being factors.
I can’t see you putting yourself out of a job
so I’m itching to know what you all conclude.
Hope Aberdeen’s treating you well. Save us a sweet!
Posted by Anthony on July 21st, 2008 at 9:46 pmTo be honest, we had quite a narrow discussion in the end, but most of it is included somewhere in the meanderings of http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/webservices/2008/07/28/the-iwmw2008-aftermath/
Posted by Phil on July 28th, 2008 at 3:33 pm