"The JISC" and the "JISCWorld"

I got the a mail from “The JISC” today about grants – for those who don’t know

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is funded by the UK HE and FE funding bodies2 to provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research.

Don’t stop reading , because I want you to read the way the call was presented on the The JISC blog…

Information Environment Rapid Innovation Grants We (Andy, Amber, Balviar, David, James) are happy to announce that we are about to issue a new Grant-Funded Call for rapid innovation projects within the Information Environment on 6 March 2009. You’ll be able to read all the text about what money is available and the conditions for using it in more detail in the Grant but to give an overview of what we are looking for:

How many of your grant awarding bodies announce their funding opportunities like that? But “The JISC” (I train myself not to call it JISC) is a public-facing communal organism which has a major theme of building communities. Many of it’s calls stress “VLE”s (virtual learning environments). What’s one of those? The last call (paraphrased) said “the first phase of VLEs led to an agreement on what VLEs are… they are extremely heterogeneous”… i.e. we all have different ideas and visions.
So “the JISC” – sounds likes a creature from Dr. Seuss – puts forward a lot of small funding opportunities which are primary for “innovation” or “fun projects”. It today’s e-culture “fun projects” are not luxuries – they are essentials. a bright idea can take off into orbit, or die at birth. The only way to find out is to try it!
We’ve had funding from “The JISC” including some for TheOREm – where we have developed an electronic environment for submitting theses. To add slight flavour we have invented for ourselves a mythical university in “JISCWorld” – and you can determine for yourself whether it’s suported by turtles.
We’ll be putting in a grant. We shall think of something exciting, feasible and involving people. We’re not giving away secrets on this blog, but if anyone has a collaborative idea let us know – we have great ideas for collaboration.

The tag for discussion on this rapid innovation Call is jiscri. Please use this if you’re commenting on the Call via Twitter or posting on other blogs and social media about it so we can easily gather all those comments together and learn and respond as we go along. Subscribe to the JISC-ANNOUNCE list at www.jiscmail.ac.uk to get notified about this or other funding opportunities from JISC or go along to http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities.aspx on 6 March to get the call.

Twitter is great – my group use it to know about events before they have happened. I’m sure that the JISC call was twittered immediately. So I don’t need to, but i have tagged this post as “jiscr”.
And – I’ll blog more later – I’ve been invited by The JISC to talk on digital libraries in Oxford on April 2 2009. See some of you there…