The results of the JISC MOSAIC competition were announced this week. The winning entries were great, and I think their prizes were well deserved. The only downside in this was that my entry didn’t make the cut. I will admit to having a moment of disappointment over this, but this passed in about 5 seconds – after all, I’d really enjoyed the challenge of writing my entry and was relatively pleased with the result.

Later in the week I fell into conversation with a couple of people on Twitter about how there hadn’t been much collaboration in the competition. With one notable exception none of the contestants had published early thoughts online, and all the entries had been from individuals rather than teams.

During the course of this conversation I managed to both insult and upset someone I greatly like, admire and respect. For this I am truly sorry. This post is is in the way of an apology as well as an attempt to express my own thoughts around the nature of ‘developer competitions’ such as JISC MOSAIC.

The idea of a developer competition is that you set a challenge, aimed at computer programmers and interested others, and offer prizes to the best entries – the criteria can vary wildly. Perhaps the biggest prize of this type we’ve seen is the $1million NetFlix prize, but in the UK HE community where I work there have been a few smaller prizes on offer, and more widely in the UK community there have been prizes for ideas about using government data, and we are about to see one launched on the use of Museum data. The JISC MOSAIC competition offered a 1st prize of £1000 for work on library usage data.

One of the amazing things about the web, and perhaps particularly about the communities I’m engaged in, is the incredible personal commitment made in terms of time and resource by individuals to what many would regard as ‘work’. Both of the people I was talking to put in a great deal of effort into contributing to and developing ideas that many might think of as ‘the day job’ – and they do so with no thought of reward.

So – given this tendency to be self-motivated to solve problems, contribute, take part etc. Why do we need developer competitions?

My starting point is to look at my own motivation for entering the JISC MOSAIC competition. Would I have done this work without the competition? Trying to be completely honest here – probably not. However, I would almost certainly done other things instead – perhaps blogged more, perhaps done some other development (like this). So the competition focussed my energy on a particular area of work. Was I motivated by the cash prize? I’m not sure – at the end of the day it isn’t that relevant to me (although no doubt I could have found something to treat myself to). I think it was just the idea of the ‘competition’ that gave me the focus. I’m the kind of person who works relatively well with clear deadlines – so having a date by which a set of work was to be done definitely gave me something to aim at.

So – the competition was one element. However, I was also looking for ways to dust off my scripting skills. I used to script in Perl as part of my job, but I haven’t done this for several years – I had been looking for ways of picking this up again as it was something I always enjoyed doing. I am also extremely interested in the ideas behind the competition – I believe libraries should be exploiting their usage data more, and I was keen to show the community how valuable that usage data might be.

I don’t assume that others are motivated in the same way as me. When the usage data that was part of the JISC MOSAIC competition was first put online somebody immediately took it and transformed it into RDF – they weren’t motivated by a competition, they just did it.

My conclusion is that such competitions harness existing energy in the community and focus it on a particular problem for a particular time period. It won’t generally work where people aren’t inclined to do the work anyway. You need an interesting problem or proposition to engage people.

So far, so good? I’m not sure. The problem with a competition is that it is, well, competitive. Again trying to be honest about my own situation (and I’m not particularly proud of this, so don’t take it as an endorsement of my own approach) is that I immediately became more protective of my ideas. The competition had put a ‘value’ on them that they hadn’t previously had. I should say I actually started work on two entries to the competition – one was in collaboration with someone else, which unfortunately we weren’t able to pull together in time – so it wasn’t all about ‘me’. However, I didn’t announce my own entry until I was ready to submit. This isn’t how I usually work – I’m usually happy to share half baked ideas (as readers of this blog will know only too well!).

Again I think the factors around this are complex. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to give away my idea. The truth is that I’m not a very good programmer. I wanted to take this chance to develop my programming skills (or at least get myself back to my previous level of incompetence). I am under no illusions – any developer worth their salt could take my idea and do a better job with it. In general this would be great – if my idea is good enough to inspire other people to do it much much better than I can I’d be very happy. But for the period of the competition this suddenly seemed like a bad idea.

Reflecting on this now, this shows a pretty rubbish (on my part) attitude to others – the ‘fear’ that my idea would be ‘stolen’ (and of course the egoism that says my idea was worth stealing). I’m pretty confident in retrospect that the only possible outcome of publishing early would have been a better entry (possibly in collaboration with others). However, I would say that my guess is it would have resulted in me not doing the coding – which I would have been sorry about.

I am going to blog my entry in detail, and release all the work I’ve done – which others are more than welcome to use and abuse.

So although I think developer competitions work in terms of focussing people on a problem, I think there are some possible downsides, perhaps chief of which is that competitions may discourage collaboration. I don’t think this is a given though, and so in closing here are some thoughts that future developer competitions might want to consider:

• Is there an element in your competition that encourages team entries above or aswell as individual entries?
• Can you reward collaboration either within or outside the competition structure?
• How are you going to ensure that the whole community can share and benefit from the competition outcomes? Plan this from day 1!

Perhaps consider splitting the prizes in different ways to acheive this – not one ‘big winner’, but rather judging and rewarding contributions as you go along. Perhaps consider having a ‘collaboration’ environment where ideas can be submitted (and judged separately) and where teams can form and work together.

A final thought – I really enjoyed entering the JISC MOSAIC competition – it stretched my skills and scratched an itch for me. I am in no way disappointed I didn’t win – the winning entries were very deserving. I fully intend to do more scripting/programming going forward. And sharing.