Eyefood

Introduction

I’ve been meaning to write this for ages. Mostly, whenever I make something I’m proud of online, I just link to it. But for reasons that I’ll elaborate on later in this series, I’ve deliberately made this piece of software a closed-community, and as a result, I haven’t been able to simply point some links at it.

I’ve been responsible for the web activities of the course that I teach on - BA (Hons) Contemporary Art Practices - for quite some time now. Longer than I’ve been a member of staff on the course in fact. Originally, the course website was a gallery-esque tool, there to show some of the student work generated in the course of the years, and to give information out about the course. But in recent years, there has been a desire for the site to actually do something.

Originally, most of the experiments I tried into student-driven site content were just that - experiments. I figured that it would give the students a sense of ‘partcipation’ if they were to actively upload their work to the site, and (frankly, sorry) would make my job of collating “Stuff” for it a lot easier.

We tried two specific things - first of all a simple account-bsaed gallery affair, which I tried to tack a few useful functions onto (like calendars and such). It had promise (and ironically, is almost exactly what we have today, just four years too early), but the time and resources weren’t there to develop it to an operational position.

The second approach I took was to try and set up individual blogs for every single student on the course. With limited resources (again), this involved a hasty decision about which software to choose (this was before the monolithic Wordpress and Typepad-like options were starting to be established as ’standards’), and a rapid installation of some open-source blogging tool on my own home server.

For all its faults, that version actually worked, and got picked up by one or two students. But “one or two” out of a cohort of one hundred and eighty isn’t really a decent adoption-rate.

During all that time though, I had obviously been looking into various web-based social networks as part of my own work - things like Flickr, and YouTube (and its precursors), so in 2005 when I was asked specifically to produce a tool for our students to catalogue their research, and for us to provide feedback to them, I had some influence that enabled me to think differently about how I might approach it.

…

The site that emerged did so partly by accident. The two specific ‘briefs’ - of a research database and student-specific feedback - meant that I had to develop ways in which (a) students could upload pieces of work and/or research to a web site, and (b) we as staff could send private messages to students. So in doing those two things, I developed pieces of code that would enable the areas that the site has excelled in - uploading various different pieces of work, and acting as a means of communication across the School.

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Anyway. That’s all probably very boring. I could probably expand on this boringness by going into great detail about what version 1.0 of the site looked like.

But I won’t.

Tags: cagd, dev, Open Habitat, web2.0