Opening Up Developer House

Stay tuned here and to #devhouse on Twitter for all of the latest

We're excited to kick off our second Developer House here at the OCLC Developer Network by welcoming 12 library technologists for a week of brainstorming, learning and coding: Bilal Khalid, Bill Jones, Candace Lebel, Emily Flynn, Francis Kayiwa, Janina Sarol, Jason Thomale, Rachel Maderik, Sarah Johnston, Scott Hanrath, Shawn Denny, and Steelsen Smith. This is such a talented group—each person has terrific skills on their own—together they will be unstoppable.

But just what is Developer House? It’s a space away from the day-to-day tasks to really work on something significant. It’s a week of talking, coding, laughing and working side-by-side together to solve problems in libraries that can be solved through technology innovation. We throw bean bags, lava lamps, conversations and caffeine into the mix, aimed to make it a really fun, productive week for everyone.

This particular Developer House is focused on Discovery. Participants will work on any number of challenges with today’s current discovery services, as well as create new apps, widgets and things as-yet-unknown with OCLC’s WorldCat Discovery API and others.

Today we started at noon and, after a quick welcome and overview of the week, got down to business with talking about the future or possible futures of Discovery for libraries. Participants represent a wide range of libraries and consortia…publics, academics, special libraries, groups. Tonight at dinner we’ll figure out what projects everyone wants to tackle. Usually people team up in small groups to work on a particular challenge that they identify and solve. I am really looking forward to seeing what we come up with!

Tomorrow and the rest of the week we’ll have lots of work time, punctuated with small bursts of adrenaline. There is always ample time away from screens, too. We’ll go visit the lights of the Columbus Zoo and other fun things like that, before the Friday afternoon Show and Tell, where everyone gets to show off their final outcomes.

We'll share more about this terrific group and what we're up to over the course of this week. We'll be updating both here and on Twitter (@devnet, #devhouse) throughout the week. Stay tuned to see what’s next!