Competition ideas from the Open University

Over on his blog, the Open University's Tony Hirst posts a number of ideas for submissions to the competition.

He writes,

"Time is a scarce resource, which makes building a major piece of software for the Library Mashup Competition difficult. Here then is one particular roadmap I hope to follow in assembling small standalone applications using small amounts of reusable code - I anticipate 30mins to 2 hours effort for each one. Each mini-app will provide useful functionality as a standalone item, but should also be capable of being integrated or aggregated with others items to provide a more comprehensive (integrated) tool suite. Providing separate scripts for each component: 1) allows for point testing of different functionality; 2) increases the number of "baby scripts" available for other people to build on or reuse (without them having to strip out other functionality)."

It's an interesting approach, and fully in keeping with the processes and conversations we hoped to nurture by running the competition. I should also stress, to assuage the worries of those thinking about submitting an entry of their own, that there is no presumption on the part of the judges that the winning entry will be a "major piece of software".