open source governance

Since early November 2006, EDUCAUSE has been engaged in ongoing discussions with Blackboard regarding their assertion of patent rights and the concerns raised in a letter to the Blackboard leadership [PDF 38.9 KB] EDUCAUSE President Brian Hawkins sent in October on behalf of the EDUCAUSE Board of Directors. Other groups, including The Sakai Foundation, have also been engaged in discussions on this matter.

Today, February 1, 2007, Blackboard announced a non-assertion pledge that directly emanates from these discussions. The boards of directors of EDUCAUSE and The Sakai Foundation have agreed to and have issued a joint statement [PDF 41.2 KB] about this pledge.

In this 19 minute recording, we'll hear from MIT's MacKenzie Smith about a range of interesting work evolving out of SIMILE, D-Space and more..


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

In this 14 minute recording, we'll hear from Nancy Eaton, Dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications at The Pennsylvania State University.  We'll talk about her unique role at Penn State, DPubS, Google books, and more. 


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Spring Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

Even after dinner the night before with free-flowing wine (and port), a large number of people turned up bright and early this morning to hear Paul David (Stanford and Oxford) talk about the economics of open source and Niall Sclater (The Open University) talk about the business case for rolling out Moodle across an institution of 200,000 distance learning students.

Day one of the OSS Watch went very well, rihgt up to the conference in the dining hall at Exeter College, which dates from 1618. The dark, wood-panelled part you can see at the far end of the hall is the choir gallery, dating from when all the Oxford colleges were primarily religious rather than primarily academic institutions.

Whatever drawbacks Oxford may have as a place to live, a place to work or a place to hold events, there is not lack of history and no lack of architecture.

In this podcast, I speak with MIT's McKenzie Smith about the Science Commons, governance of DSpace, The MIT Libraries' investigation of Semantic Web technology via their SIMILE project, grid computing vis-a-vis the SDSC Storage Resource Broker, and digital preservation.  

To learn more about the activities of the MIT Libraries,
you can view their annual report at the url below:
http://libraries.mit.edu/about/annual/ar05/technology.html


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org