CRIG – JISC, etc.

I lauded the victors of the CRIG competition: (CRIG winners) – and they have commented:

Dave Tarrant Says:
April 17th, 2008 at 9:04 am eWe look forward to it
The thing which was remarkable about winning was the fact that we actually did code most of it whilst at OR08, which fulfilled the specification of the fact it was a developers challenge not an award to the best project which has been running for a while. So not sure if an extension of the project as an entry for next year will be valid.
We’ll have to think of something else

PMR: I’ve talked with Jim and Peter Sefton about this and I hadn’t realised that they had actually done the whole thing at the meeting, missing the talks, etc.. In any other sphere of life this would be incredible, but in hackerdom the sights are set very high so this is merely amazing.  Also I gather that it’s based on ORE which is also fantastic as it means that ORE can be made to work and do really exciting things. We are hoping to build on this – more will be public later.
This is an effective use of funding. It’s inexpensive (< 5E-05 of the black hole left with STFC, for example) and it generated a lot of worthwhile ideas and demonstrators even if they couldn’t all win. It highlights the importance of writing code – often more important than a report which concludes that “more work needs to be done in this area”).
So kudos to JISC as well as the winners.