"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

Job Title

Project Manager for Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) Project and Research Officer

Contact Details

UKOLN,
University of Bath,
Bath,
BA2 7AY
tel: ++44 (0) 1225 384594
fax: ++44 (0) 1225 386256
email: m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk
skype: mr_mahendra_mahey
twitter: mahendra_mahey
Linkedin: http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/mahendra-mahey/5/a48/158
mobile: +447896300820

Biography

Mahendra Mahey is a Project Manager for the Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) project. This is a JISC-funded project based at UKOLN. DevCSI is about helping developers in HE to realise their full potential, by creating the conditions for them to be able to learn, to network effectively, to share ideas and to collaborate, creating a 'community' of HE developers which is greater than the sum of its parts. So with every developer employed in a Higher Education Institution in the UK comes a wealth of talent and experience. The developer benefits. Higher Education benefits. The main thrust of DevCSI activity currently is to run and/or sponsor events for and by developers and to encourage a community to form around these shared activities. DevCSI is managed by UKOLN and funded by the JISC. He was involved in the organisation of last year's Dev8D 2010 event.

Mahendra was a Repositories Research Officer as part of the Repositories Research Team (RRT) under the JISC Digital Repositories Programme. RRTs remit was quite wide and included helping projects find and exploit synergies across the programme and beyond, gathering scenarios and use cases from projects, liaising with other national and international repositories activities, including liaison with the e-Framework, synthesizing project and programme outcomes, and engaging with interoperability standards activity and repository architectures. I worked particularly in the areas of project synthesis, repository ecology, analysis of use cases and scenarios, organising a number of events, content packaging standards and data repositories.

The Repositories Research Team was a collaboration between two JISC Innovation Support Centres UKOLN and CETIS. UKOLN had worked previously on repositories in a number of contexts including ePrints UK, the Open Archives Forum and Delos, and CETIS, the JISC Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards, has considerable experience in supporting the development of digital repositories for e-learning. Initially, I was involved supporting the original 25 projects within the Programme, providing advice and guidance, helping exploit synergies across the programme and beyond, synthesising project and programme outcomes, liaising with other national and international repositories activities, dissemination activities, scoping a repository reference model and collating project outputs, particularly scenarios, use cases and workflows, for use in scoping the repository landscape. Communication and dissemination across the Programme wass facilitated through the support wiki (DigiRep). The Digital Repositories Programme was a £4m JISC programme to enhance the implementation and development of digital repositories in the UK. We established the JISC-Repositories@jiscmail.ac.uk list, which has over 1000 members.

Before joining UKOLN Mahendra was employed as an e-learning resources adviser for four years with the JISC Regional Support Centres in the West Midlands in England and the North and East Region of Scotland focusing on promoting and using electronic resources and implementing Information Communication Technologies effectively in teaching and learning in further and higher education, working closely with senior management, staff in learning centres, libraries, classrooms and over distances.

Prior to that he worked for Birmingham City Council, on a project to develop their Grid for Learning, a schools web development project. He worked for over ten years as a lecturer in at various further education colleges (Psychology, English to Speakers of Other Languages, Information and Communication Technologies, commercial IT training, and Multimedia) and for almost three years in Warsaw, Poland teaching English as a Foreign Language.