Joss Winn, of the Centre for Educational Research and Development, has just blogged some insightful reflections on writing JISC bids over the past year and a half. Given the length of time he’s been writing bids (since last April), Joss has been incredibly successful. One of the projects he led – JISCPress – has even changed the way JISC publishes its funding calls and final reports online. Here’s a snippet:
Like JISCPress, all the other bids that I’ve been successful in receiving funds for were based on work (actually, better described as ‘fun’) that we’d been doing in our ‘spare time’, evenings and weekends. We were, in effect, alreadydoing the projects and when the right funding call came up, we applied to it, demonstrating to JISC that we were committed to the project and offering a clear sense of the benefits to the wider community. JISCPress was based on WriteToReply, ChemistryFM was based on my work on the Lincoln Academic Commons, Total ReCal, Jerome and Linking You are all based on a variety2 of work that Alex, Nick, Paul and, to a lesser extent I, have been doing in between other work. What’s worth underlining here is that we’re fortunate to have Snr. Managers at the University of Lincoln, who support us and encourage a ‘labs’ approach to incubate ideas.
Read the full blog here.