41 posts tagged “general”
It was last year on 5th December 2007 when I reported that I had been awarded the Information World Review’s Information Professional of the Year. With this year’s winner due to be announced at the Online Information 2008 conference in the next few days I thought it would be timely to summarise what I’ve been up to during my year as holder of the award (and also to update the portrait on the blog).
It’s been a very busy year for engaging with my user communities: I’ve given 32 presentations to date (with one more presentation to come) together with 2 online presentations. As can be seen from the accompanying map, talks have been given in Montreal (a half day blog workshop and a professional forum on openness at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference), Taiwan (an invited presentation on “Library 2.0: Opportunities and Challenges” at the NDAP 2008 conference), Singapore (an invited paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference) and Stockholm (an invited presentation on “Realising The Potential of Web 2.0” at the Nordlib 2.0 conference), as well as many talks throughout the UK.
This year has also seen an increased amount of direct engagement with the cultural heritage sector. I’ve run a number of day-long workshops for MLA regional agencies, as well as additional events in Scotland and Wales. These have all gone done very well - one of the Sharing Made Simple workshops for example, was rated (on 1 score of 1 to 6) 5.91 for the facilitator’s knowledge of the subject, 5.82 for engagement with the participants and had an overall rating of 5.82.
The workshops have also provided an opportunity to gain a much better insight into the ways in which Web 2.0 can be used within the cultural heritage sector and also the barriers to its effective use. This information has being stored in a wiki (as opposed to the traditional approach of licking such potentially valuable information into the walled garden of flip charts!). A task on the new year will be to synthesise this information and to make the findings more widely available.
Reflections of my work activities have also been included in two books which I contributed to this year: “Web Accessibility: Practical Advice for the Library and Information Professional” by Jenny Craven (ed.) and “Information Literacy meets Library 2.0” by Peter Godwin and Jo Parker (eds).
This year has also seen me gaining more experiences in the support of Amplified Conferences and use of networked technologies to provide distance support, with a couple of examples of participation in online conferences.
In the past 12 months I have also published 190 blog posts on the UK Web Focus blog, with additional contributions made to the JISC PoWR blog.
It has been an enjoyable 12 months in my role as Information Professional of the Year, made particularly rewarding for seeing how the benefits of Web 2.0 are now becoming more widely accepted. As one person commented on one of the workshop I facilitated earlier this year “Brian in particular displayed a real knowledge and enthusiasm for the topic, which was infectious“. I’m looking forward to continue to inflect others with my experise and enthusiams for many year’s to come :-)
Posted in GeneralResources For The Cultural Heritage Sector
I’m pleased to report that an area of the UKOLN Web site dedicated to the cultural heritage sector has now been launched.
Historical Context
UKOLN has had close links with the cultural heritage sector for many years - when I joined UKOLN back in 1996 UKOLN was funded by BLRIC (British Library Research and Innovation Centre) together with the JISC. Over time this funding body changed, initially to the LIC (Library and Information Commission) and then, as the library, museums and archives sectors moved more closely linked, by Resource which was subsequently renamed MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council).
Engagement With The Sector
UKOLN is perhaps uniquely placed to exploit its close links with the higher and further education communities, libraries (both academic and public) and museums and archives. Over the past couple of years I have become very actively involved in supporting the museums sector, having been a program committee member, speaker, workshop facilitator and chair at the Museums and the Web conferences in 2007 and 2008 and a speaker at UK Museums on the Web conferences in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.
But perhaps more significant to the broader cultural heritage sector are the workshops we have been running which have attracted participants from across a range of museums, libraries and archives. This has included workshops held on behalf of MLA London and MLA Yorkshire and CyMAL (the Welsh equivalent of MLA). We have also run workshops for the Society of Archives in 2007 and 2008, with a workshop for the Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions to be held in November.
Many of these workshops focus on ways in which Web 2.0 can provide benefits to the cultural heritage sector, although a rather wider perspective on the digital landscape is often provided, covering additional areas such as the preservation of digital resources.
Changing Political Context
The importance for UKOLN (which is a JISC Innovation Centre) to engage in this way with the cultural heritage sector was highlighted in Elspeth Hyams’ editorial in the CILIP Update magazine (June 2008, Vol. 7, No. 6) has the byline ”In This Climate, You Have To Innovate“. As Elspeth described (and I commented upon recently) “The age of the quiescent library or information manager or service is dead“.
The editorial went on to describe the MLA’s action plan for public libraries and reports on the MLA’s Chief Executive, Roy Clare, calls for “radical action on structure, far-sighted leadership vision and more public Private Partnerships“. The editorial concludes with the warning that “It’s not just a challenge for the academic schools, but for all of us” but also suggests that “we should use tough times as a golden opportunity to focus on the strategy - and upgrade and refresh our skills“.
I think it is clear from these comments that significant changes will be needed within the cultural heritage sector. And indeed Roy Clare has commented on the failures of previous national initiatives to deliver compelling user-focussed services. As reported in a post on the MCG JISCmail list: “Roy Clare highlighted the NOF Digitise project as an example of where we went wrong in assuming that mass digitisation and online publishing of collections would be engaging“.
The political and funding changes (it seems public sector money is now being used to fund the 2012 Olympics) are taking place at a time in which Web 2.0 approaches are steadily gaining momentum, with smaller organisations (and indeed organisations) now being able provide services which previously would have required significant amounts of funding.
The need to ensure that “engaging” digital services are provided by cultural heritage organisations underpins the workshops we have been providing. It also reflects the strategic thinking of various national bodies, including the National Library of Wales which in its Shaping the future: The Library’s strategy 2008-2009 to 2010-201 document (PDF format) states that:
We propose … Taking advantage of new online technology, including the construction of Web 2.0 services, to develop progressive ways of interacting with users. It is expected that the Library itself will provide only some specific services on its website. Instead, the intention is to promote and facilitate the use of the collections by external users, in accordance with specific guidelines.
A review of the uses of Web 2.0 services by the National Library of Wales was given in a talk by Paul Bevan at the first Sharing Made Simple: An Introduction to the Social Web workshop - and I’m pleased to say that Paul describes this work as a co-author of an invited paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” which I’ll be presenting at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference in Singapore in a few weeks time.
UKOLN is well-positioned to identify such examples of best practices, make the examples available to wider audiences, encourage debate and use such case studies in the development of more general models for the sector. In this respect our links with the higher education sector is particularly valuable, as higher eductaional institutions seem to be better positioned to make early use of innoovative new technologies and has a healthy tradition of encouraging open debate on the merits of such innovation.
Resources For The Sector
The new area of the UKOLN Web site provides access to a variety of resources on a range of issues of particular relevance to the cultural heritage sector, and brings together information previously distributed across the UKOLN Web site.
As well as providing access to the events we’ll be running another important area of the Web site is the IntroBytes area, which provides access to a range of briefing document we have produced, sometimes in conjunction with practitioners from the cultural heritage sector. These documents are used at many of the event we run, which helps to ensure that we receive feedbackon the content of the documents. It should also be noted that the documents are available under a Creative Commons licence, which permits their reuse for non-commercial purposes. This licence was chosen in order to ensure that the resources can be embedded for use within organisation in the cultureal heritage sector (and beyond).
Sustainability
We have received positive feedback on our results, as can be seen from comments provided at the recent workshops for CyMAL (which was given a rating of 5.35 out of a maximum score of 6) and MLA Yorkshire.
In order to ensure the ongoing sustainability of our work for the cultural heritage sector we are now running workshops on a cost-recovery basis for the wider sector. This has included workshops for the voluntary sector and CyMAL with additional workshops already scheduled for CyMAL and ASVA.
If anyone would be interested in organising a workshop along the lines described, feel free to get in touch.
Posted in GeneralIn a recent tweet Matt Jukes alerted me to the MarkMail service. As Matt forms part of my trusted “interesting Web applications alerting services” I went to the Web site. What I found was a search interface across over 4,300 mailing lists. A search for ‘ukoln’ provided me with not only various posts containing this string, but also details of the person who made the post, the lists posted to and also, as shown, a graph of the numbers of posts over time.
Initially I felt that the graph supported my view that email is dying, but a search for a more general term, “web”, showed me that this was clearly an inappropriate conclusion to make based on this evidence.
But perhaps of more relevance is the main point that Matt made in his tweet:
just discovered http://markmail.org/would be cool if jiscmail lists were searchable here as well..
Yes it would be great if JISCMail exposed its mail archives to third party indexing services such as MarkMail. But to do that (or rather to do that effectively) would require the JISCMail mail archives to provide ‘cool’ application-independent and persistent URIs (which they don’t currently do) and allow robot software to access the resources. Doing this will, of course, require the service to commit resources to develop work and make changes in policies. A popular and large scale service, such as JISCMail, would only be in a position to do this if they could see tangible benefits to their user communities. I hope the example of the MarkMail service illustrates the potential benefits of opening up one’sdata to third party services. I have to admit that I find the JISCMail search interface so poor that I seldom use it. Exposing the data to other services (whether MarkMail, Google or whatever) would enhance access to data available in the JISCMail Web archives, without JISCMail having to wait for the underlying Listserv software to conform with fundamental Web architectural principles.
I’m sure many readers of this blog will be familiar with the Have I Got News For You TV programme. So I’d like to make my contribution. Which is the odd one out for the following: UMIST, AHDS, Lotus and Yahoo!?
For those unfamilar with this BBC programme, the convention is that the first responses are expected to be humourus, before attempting an answer. And note that there isn’t a single answer to the question.
I’ve previously suggested that there’s a need for political realism in the debates over ownership of social networks and the general direction of Web 2.0. And I’ve suggested that Old Labour is dead, and any expectations that the government will start nationalising services is being naive.
Well, I got that wrong didn’t I! However lefties in the US and Canada will probably be disappointed that the Government’s nationalisation of Northern Rock doesn’t herald a return to socialist principles - indeed even the Daily Mail acknowledges that nationalisation “is extremely rare and embarrassing for Labour“.
I think my mistake was in attempting to use political analogies which are still too relevant to many and capable of being reinterpretted in different ways.
So I was really pleased to read Martin Weller’s post on Downes vs Wiley - Cato and Cicero revisited on his Edtechie blog. As Martin describes:
Cato and Cicero both believed passionately in the same higher level goal, ie the establishment of the Roman Republic. Yet they frequently clashed about what was the best way to achieve it. In the same way I think Stephen (Downes) and David (Wiley both believe passionately in the overall aim of open education, but have differing views as to how it should be realised.
Cato was the purist, unbending and uncompromising. Cicero was the pragmatist, willing to compromise and work with a range of people to advance the republic. Cato often thought Cicero compromised too much, thus rendering his beliefs invalid. Cicero was often infuriated that Cato wouldn’t compromise and through this played in to the hands of the anti-republicans.
In his post Martin was suggesting that Stephen Downes’ objections to the Cape Town Declaration were based on the declaration’s inclusion of commercial entities, with Stephen arguing that “… the internet is already awash with really vile and intrusive commercial activity, do we have to export it too? We have the opportunity to do something really special in the world; why do we have to carve into every declaration of principle a paean to Things As They Are (and Those Who Profit From Them)?“.
Now I have to admit that, although my knowledge of Cicero and Cato is limited to having read Imperium, I have (mostly) taken a pragmatic approach to life generally and IT development in particular.
This struck me today when I read an article in CILIP Update about the inclusion of advertising leaflet in books borrowed from libraries and then returned home to find that my new passport had arrived - and a leaflet from a local estate agent was included in the letter (together with one from the NHS inviting me to join the NHS Organ Donor Register).
Now I personally don’t have any great concerns about the inclusion of adverts in library books or with my passport. Indeed if the income this generates can improve the quality of their services, then I would suggest that this is a good thing.
These particular issues, of course, aren’t about technologies. And neither, fundamentally, are the issues about ownership of social networks and use of commercially-provided services in the provision of educational and cultural heritage services (although I do acknowledge that the nature of IT can add extra complexities to the debate).
We need to recognise that the debates on the specifics of Facebook’s ownership, Bill Gates plans for Microsoft’s future role in Internet services and Rupert Murdoch’s plans for his media empire will only go so far. The Catos (Catoers, Catoists?) followers of Cato will need to convince the followers of Cicero that there vision have a realistic chance of being implemented, otherwise the debates are doomed to be endlessly repeated.
I was recently using Google Scholar to try and find out more about the impact of my peer-reviewed publications. Initially I was looking at papers published since 2004, but I then thought it would be interesting to see how far back the citation data might go.
So I used Google Scholar to find out about links to my paper on The Evolution of Web Protocols which was published in the Journal of Documentation in 1999 (Vol. 55, No. 1 January 1999, pp. 71-81).
I discovered two citations to this paper: one in course material for a course on Organization of Information written by the School of Library and Information Studies at The University of Alabama and, much more interestingly, one in a US Patent claim! The title of the patent is “System and method for discovering information about web resources ”. And, as can be seen from the Google Patent Search, the patent was filed in February 2002 and issued in August 2007, with the assignee being Microsoft Corporation!
The first part of the patent states that the claim is based on:
A computer-implemented method for identifying metadata about a first resource identified by a first Uniform Resource Identifier (“URI”), the method comprising:
issuing a request for the first resource identified by the first URI;
receiving a response document from the first URI;
parsing the response document received in response to the issued request, wherein the response document includes a second URI for accessing a second resource, wherein the response document includes an indication that metadata about the first resource exists on the second resource, wherein the indication indicates a metadata format;
generating a request to retrieve the metadata from the second resource, wherein the generated request is formatted to support the metadata format identified by the indication; and
retrieving the metadata from the second resource.
The patent goes on to describe how this will be implemented:
The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the response document comprises an HTML document and the indication comprises a LINK tag.
Yes, the patent is based on use of the HTML LINK tag to link to a metadata description.
As my colleague Pete Cliff has pointed out to me;
OAI-ORE says you can include a resource map (which describes the agreggation of resources that make up (for example) a document - an article in the form of a Web page that includes images say)
<link rel=”resourcemap” href=”http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/importantdoc/map.xml” mce_href=”http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/importantdoc/map.xml” />
The resource map is metadata. Does this mean that doing this now will require paying a fee to Microsoft?
How can this patent claim have been granted? And why was my paper cited in the patent?
Looking back at my paper I find that I stated that:
Metadata can be described as the missing architectural component of the web.
I went on to say that:
Work in this area included Netscape’s proposal on “Meta Content Framework Using XML” [32] which provides a specification for describing information structures (metadata) for collections of networked information using XML and Microsoft’s “Web Collections using XML” [33] proposal for providing a metadata framework which can be used for a variety of applications, such as sitemaps, distributed authoring and content labelling.
Both of these proposals recognised the importance of XML for representing the syntax of the metadata. The proposals, together with other related work, led to the development of RDF, the Resource Description Framework, which provides a framework for metadata giving interoperability between applications that exchange machine-readable information on the Web [34].
At the time of writing (July 199
work in developing RDF is still at an early stage. However RDF does seem to provide a mechanism for pulling together the various related metadata components and adding a new architectural component to the Web.
It seems the patent claim cites my work as evidence that use of the <LINK> tag to embed metadata was not envisaged back in 1998. However my paper was never intended to do provide a complete description of the architecture of Web. And I am sure that there will be examples of use of the <LINK> tag for this purpose prior to the submission of this patent in 2002.
My paper clearly has had an impact which I hadn’t expected! However rather than flaming me for helping Microsoft to patent use of metadata in Web pages
The Debates
Martin Weller has recently commented on his Ed Techie blog that there has been a lot of discussion about PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) recently, and the relationships between PLEs, VLEs, TLEs (Teacher Learner Environment) and DPLEs (Default PLEs). Andy Powell has also discussed PLEs and PREs (Personal Research Environment) is a recent post on P vs. P in a user-centric world: the first of three posts he has written prior to our joint UCISA presentation.
PLE 1.0
This made me think about what I understand by the term PLE. And I realised that my first experience of a PLE was in primary school in the 1960s - back then a PLE was a Pen Learning Environment! And I was around at the time of several technological innovations as well as different ways in which the Pen Learning Environment (which in this post I’ll refer to as PLE 1.0) was used to support my learning. When I started at school I have vague recollections of using a ’scratch pen’ which we dipped in the ink well on our desk. However this was soon made obsolescent by the ‘biro’ technology. But when I passed my 11-plus and went to grammar school I remember one teacher who didn’t approve of ‘biro; technology and insisted that all of his homework had to be submitted using a fountain pen. But such technological luddism wasn’t sustainable, and I think that only happened in my first year. By the time I was a teenager I was free to use a biro.
The initial focus of control was clearly on the technology itself. But I have only recently realised the different pedagogical approaches which accompanying PLE 1.0. In some classes the PLE was used to write down what the teacher had written on the blackboard. However other teachers (or did this reflect other disciplines) the inefficiencies of the teacher having to write on the blackboard were removed, and we had to copy directly from our text books.
It was only later on the the teachers seemed to lose interest in controlling the technologies used and allowed me, the learner, the flexibility to make notes as I preferred.
PLE 2.0
What can PLE 2.0, the Personal Learning Environment, learn from my experiences in the 1960s and 70s? I think our institutions are still focusing too much on the technologies themselves and ways in which the technologies should be used - scratch pens, biros and fountain pen debates revisited. And there seems to be a tendency to be seek the best solution and make that the norm for all students - a Parker pen for all! But what we learnt from our writing instruments was the advantages to be gained when the technology became invisible, and we were free to make our own choices. (but when, I wonder, did personalised pens become prevalent?)
The ideal PLE (to drop the versioning I introduced in this post) should surely follow the pen in becoming technologically invisible, and just something that the learner uses to support their tasks? And, perhaps more importantly, the institution’s response should be to provide the flexibility needed to support this approach.
Spotted recently on Hansard (25 Feb 2008):
Departmental ICT
Norman Baker: To ask the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills how many hits the (a) most popular website and (b) least popular website run by his Department has received since 1 January. [162286]
Mr. Lammy:The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills corporate website was launched on 28 June 2007, following the machinery of Government changes and creation of the new Department. The numbers of hits for the most and least popular websites that come under the DIUS remit are as follows:
Website Number of hits( 1) from 1 January 2007 to 25 October 2007 The Intellectual Property Office (www.ipo.gov.uk) 236,301,690 Technology Strategy Board (www.berr.gov.uk/innovation/technologystrategyboard/index.html (2)82,370 (1) Please note that a ‘hit’ is simply a successful request to the web server from a visitor’s browser for any type of file, whether an image, HTML page, or any other type. A single web page can cause many hits, one for each image included on the page. (2) Figures are form page views from 1 July 2007 to 25 October 2007 as hits are not measured for this site.
Now what is worse, I wonder? The fact that Norman Baker, Lib Dem MP for Lewis is asking about the popularity of UK Government Web sites based on such simplistic criteria or the Government’s response which compares ‘hits’ with ‘page views’? Even worse is that the official response is so defensive about having to provide figures on ‘page views’ (which is a legitimate measure on Web site usage) as data on hits (which reflects the Web site design and not the popularity of the Web site) are not measured.
Even worse is that the response compares a Web site domain (www.ipo.gov.uk) with a Web site area (www.berr.gov.uk/innovation/technologystrategyboard/index.html).
And the latter Web page is not longer available - although I suspect that it refers to http://www.berr.gov.uk/dius/innovation/technologystrategyboard/page40217.html
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a Government Web page which no longer exists isn’t particularly popular!
But what worries me most about such absurdities are the implications of the Government’s increasing preoccupation with such (flawed) measures of impact and the responses which might be expected from the Government critics. I could easily envisage a Daily Mail leader article being critical of a drop in the numbers of ‘hits’ to Government Web sites, ignoring the realities of technological enhancements which may mean that although the numbers of hits or page views go down, the user may actually be getting a much more valuable and useful experience (e.g. the data being surfaced in other areas).
AJ Cann recently described his experiences of “teaching” PLEs (his quotes). In his post he described how his discussions with his peers in the elearning community began with a ‘tweet’.
And his colleagues (or should that, in the context of Twitter, be his ‘followers’) asked him to share his experiences. Alan then went on to explain that he felt that:
I should start by saying that I don’t believe you can “teach” someone how to build a personal learning environment, any more than you can teach them “wisdom” - it’s an experiential, contextual thing.
From previous discussions I’ve had with AJ I know that he is a fan on use of PLEs to support learning, as opposed to the more monolithic VLE approach - and, in a way, the question of whether the VLE is open source or not is a bit of a red herring. But although PLEs may please AJ, how confident can we be that it is the PLEs which helped with the “clear winners with the students, notably the Google suite.” Might not the enthusiasms shown by the students simply reflect his own enthusiasms.
AJ will, of course, be aware of such factors (and I should declare that I am a member of an advisory group for AJ Cann’s Leicester PLE project which is “Using Web 2.0 to Cultivate Information Literacy via Construction of Personal Learning Environments“). But if we are honest we (the blog readers and those engaged with Web 2.0) will be aware that there with be large scale chunky proprietary and unfashionable enterprise systems which are crying out “Love me do” - and the supporters of such systems will, indeed, be happy to use the systems - and there are also likely to be happy users of such systems, too. Indeed I can remember the first time I attended the ALT-C conference -I attended the technical standards where I heard about developments using an SOA approaches, the e-Framework and Web 2.0 developments, but in the other strands other academics and e-learning support staff were presenting about the quality of the learning and user satisfaction for services delivered by Blackboard and Web CT.
I guess we do need to be honest about how our enthusiasms, whether it’s for Web 2.0, open source, social networks, Twitter or whatever, may help to enthuse others but the indifference shown by the majority may be invisible to us.
Back in 2005 I presented a paper entitled “Let’s Free IT Support Materials!” at the EUNIS 2005 conference, an annual conference aimed at IT support departments throughout Europe. In the paper I argued that IT Service departments should be making their documentation and other support materials available under a Creative Commons licence for reuse by the wider community. I pointed out that the UK had a well-established tradition of collaboration, through organisations such as UCISA, and, in the area of document sharing, had already set up a national archive of Computing Service documentation.
This was initially established in the late 1980s/early 1990s based on a centralised repository of documentation on the HENSA/Micros service at the University of Lancaster. However floundered due to the complexities of network access in pre-Web days and the effort it took to transfer resources to a centralised location. A renewed effort in the mid 1990s provided a Web-based interface to a distributed archive known as the UCISA TLIG Document Sharing Archive. Although this required little effort from participating institutions, the service failed to be sustainable due to the technical expertise require to provide and maintain the indexing across the distributed archives. And since the search interface points to a script on Mailbase, despite the message saying “Unfortunately the search facility is currently unavailable. We hope to rectify this shortly” I suspect this hasn’t worked since Mailbase was replaced by JISCMail in November 2000.
But now the indexing capabilities can be provided easily, using third party services such as the Google Custom Search Engine (GCSE). Is it really easy, you may wonder? Well the interface is shown below. and, as can be seen, setting up the search engine requires little more than entering the URLs to be indexing and then copying the code to be embedded on a Web page. Easy :-) And the search engine is easy to use from a user perspective. Why not give it a try. You might even wish to embed the search interface into your own page.
Now you might be suspicious: it’s too easy; there’s no metadata; it’s not open source; etc. My response - am I bovvered? Computing should be easy - I remember the excitement I felt when I discovered the Apple Macintosh in the 1980s and Paul Walk has been making similar comments about his iPhone. Ease-of-use and simplicity are to be applauded, I would argue.
And, as I discovered from my Twitter friends recently, a number of colleagues have been using the Google Custom Search Engine for some time: Pete Johnston for searching music sites he frequents, Mile Ellis for his search across museum collections and Phil Bradley for searching across 35 Web 2.0 sites. And thanks to Matt Jukes for pointing out the use of this approach on the JISC Web site and the How Do I? example from the Open University, which is described in a blog post by Tony Hirst. And edubloggers may find Stephen Downes Edublogs search of interest: this searches across no fewer than 456 blog sites!
But how might my experiment be scaled up to a service, in order to deliver the original aims of this service, only about 15 years late
Perhaps the UCISA TLIG group could take responsibility for developing this prototype and seeing if there are are barriers to it being deployed into service. But there might also be an interest from a institution which could see benefits of such a search facility across a region (Scotland, perhaps?).
Or maybe individuals would be motivated to do this. And as it is possible for me to open up the management interface to pothers, I would be happy to respond with anyone who may be interested.
And as I’ll be giving a talk at the UCISA Management Conference on 13th March 2008, that would be an opportunity for me to name-check anyone who would be willing to investigate further
