About

What is DevXS?

DevXS is a BarCamp / Hackathon - style conference that recognises the progressive ideas and talent that students can bring to the development of higher education services. At the core of DevXS is a two-day developer marathon, where students are encouraged to team up and build cool things that contribute to university life. It's about students sharing their ideas, mashing up data and building prototypes that improve, challenge and positively disrupt the research, teaching and learning landscapes of further and higher education. Prizes will be awarded to the best ideas, prototypes and collaborations. DevXS builds on the success of the JISC funded Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) project and events that it runs, such as the annual Dev8D conference.

Who is organising DevXS?

DevXS is organised jointly by the University of Lincoln's Student as Producer project and the JISC-funded DevCSI project, run by UKOLN at the University of Bath. It began as an idea of Nick Jackson and Alex Bilbie, two students at the University of Lincoln who now work in the University's Online Services Team.

What is DevXS for?

There is a real opportunity to engage with the energy of those working in 'social technology' to develop new ideas and resources. Individual institutions could run events and become engaged with communities of developers.
The Edgeless University, 2009.

The objectives of DevXS are similar to Dev8D, Rewired State and other BarCamp / Hackathon type conferences. DevXS is a continuous 30hr 'hack day', "a pressure cooker for innovation — an intensified period of Research and Development that months of traditional work could not replicate." It's intended to provide space, support, incentives and stimulation to students who want to be more than just consumers of university services and build cool tools that make further and higher educational institutions better, learn something in the process and meet other like-minded students across the UK.

DevXS is a response to what The Edgeless University report called a "time of maximum uncertainty and time for creative possibility between the ending of the way things have been and the beginning of the way they will be." At a time when the higher education sector is is undergoing significant change and students are increasingly expected to assume the role of consumer, Student as Producer encourages students to challenge this role through a critical engagement with their social world, where they are encouraged and supported to become more than just student-consumers during their course of research and study. DevXS is a disruptive learning experience, a pedagogical intervention for students who want to do cool stuff with the web that challenges the traditional institutions of learning.

Who should attend?

DevXS is open to undergraduate and post-graduate students across the UK and beyond. It's a conference that's principally aimed at student web developers, computer science geeks and journalism/media students who are increasingly expected to engage with data on the web. You don't have to have programming skills to attend, but you should be enthusiastic about working with developers by sharing ideas, pulling together data from various sources and working collaboratively to solve one or more of a number of challenges which will be announced before the start of DevXS.