This week I spent an enjoyable and stimulating couple of days in Birmingham at the CETIS 2013 conference. This was tempered by the knowledge that key national services like UKOLN and CETIS itself were looking ahead to new challenges, a euphemism for closing down due to withdrawl of funding. In this post I'll reflect both on what I learned from the conference, and on the impact and timing of these changes.

[This is going to be quite intense, so here's a little game for you to lighten the mood: If you are visiting Aston University, see if you can find the building and window where the inspiring quote from Einstein shown above appears!  Also, here is a YouTube link to funny cat videos in case you need to take a break to calm down from time to time.]

I have long been fascinated by JISC, which has delivered a fascinating mix of full production services (JANET being probably the most instantly recognisable), best practice advice created by community practitioners coming together, and what can only be described as "throw enough mud at the wall and some of it will stick" projects with hugely ambitious agendas. You may not recall individual projects, but be assured that when you download Open Source software, Open Access publications from institutional repositories, mash up Open Data, and share Open Educational Resources in MOOCs - JISC was there first. In many cases, JISC was farsighted enough to forsee requirements in the research and education sector that have subsequently turned into significant businesses in themselves.

But we are entering a new era, necessitated by funding reductions, changing student demographics and frankly an unwillingness to see "R&D" type activities (of which a large proportion can be expected to fail) facilitated through top sliced central funding. The most immediately obvious change here has been that we have swapped JISC for Jisc, saving a few bucks by making the Shift key last a little longer. Behind the scenes, a lot of people who have been working for JISC on its various centres and services have been having meetings with their local HR departments about redundancy and redeployment, and some have been transferred over to the new Jisc legal entity via TUPE.

These goings on are, sadly, mirroring many conversations taking place within institutions right now, as the realisation slowly dawns that the rolling back of UK Higher Education's post-92 expansion may well be permanent. The disruptive influence of the Internet (Clay Shirky's grandstanding notwithstanding) is also now starting to make its presence felt, with the development of for-credit MOOCs and partnerships with firms offering test centre facilities such as Pearson. In the UK, FutureLearn in particular now looms large over the sector - but will it be saviour or executioner? In any case there is little or no time for discussion and compromise if FutureLearn is to compete effectively with Udacity, Coursera and edX.

And here is the crowning irony - FutureLearn should have been the primary topic of CETIS 2013, instead it was the elephant in the room. So much of what so many of the participants have been doing leads inexorably to something like FutureLearn. Instead, we are breaking up the very services and facilities that are best placed to advise the sector on its transition to being "open by default", and in the urgency to get to market there is a very real danger that FutureLearn will be a pale me-too copy of the US MOOCs. Hence the JISC Diaspora, as we see former staffers with the relevant domain expertise being snapped up not just by canny UK institutions (greetings to Amber Thomas at Warwick ;-), but also by "foreigners" (hello to Nicole Harris of TERENA!) and with much more to come - notably as CETIS, UKOLN and OSS Watch are dismantled.

You might well say "fair enough, but what would you do in the same position?" I think the economic argument is actually a little more complex than it might at first appear - sometimes attack is the best form of defence, and there is undoubtedly a case to be made for strategic investments to improve our information literacy, get more people coding, increase the visibility and uptake of UK research, and expose more people to key technologies like High Performance Computing. But should Jisc try to do all these things and more? Probably not. And is it possible or desirable to maintain the status quo? Probably not.

However, what I am personally deeply sad about is the bridge burning aspect of these changes - once the key people from an organization like a CETIS or a UKOLN or an OSS Watch are gone, it's not a trivial exercise to recreate it. I hope that the members of the JISC Diaspora will still find ways to come together and collaborate, and that the moonshot projects will continue one way or another.  As Martyn Harrow says, JISC is the envy of the world - I hope we will be able to look back in years to come and say the same of Jisc.