How can we help you?

Here are some things we can help you with:

  • building new or engaging with existing development communities (for sustainability)
  • software licence advice (to comply with the JISC open source policy)
  • engaging with commercial companies (e.g software procurement)
  • finding routes to exploit your outputs commercially (e.g.institutional technology transfer units)
  • exploring options for sustainabilty of software development activities
  • evaluating the best software solution (either open source or proprietary - we are non-advocacy)
  • …

In some cases we are able to offer community building effort to projects that are committed to open development and open source. These strategic projects receive additional assistance from us in order to bridge the gap between open development requirements and the project’s funded objectives.

Sometimes we are asked to help with some aspects of open source software development that we are not funded to do. For example we cannot:

  • teach you how to program
  • develop software for you
  • give you the sort of legal advice that you would expect from a lawyer
  • recommend a specific software application or system

Not sure if we can help? Then please just mail us!

Our content

In addition to tailored one-on-one consultations OSS watch’s advice and guidance can come via our many and varied publications. The bulk of our published content consists of general material such as briefing notes conference reports opinion pieces and book reviews. We also publish research studies and slideshow presentations. All of this content is published here on our website under a Creative Commons licence.

We take our written outputs seriously and strive very hard to ensure that our documents are both accurate and of a consistently high quality. The extensive research we perform for these documents ensures that our other outputs such as consultations presentations workshops and conferences are of a similarly high standard. Each document is governed by our document life cycle policy which is described in The life of an OSS Watch document. As a result of this policy every document produced by OSS Watch is reviewed every 6 months throughtout its life in order to ensure consistency quality and integrity. You can be assured that everything we write is revisited regularly and so represents our current thinking.

The detail