Consortia

In this 11 minute recording, Grant Crawford, Director of Technology Initiatives at Midwestern Higher Education Compact guides us through the work of his organization, shares some thoughts on the Spellings report and more. 

This 44 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled From Bright Idea to Concrete Implementation: The Identity Management Life Cycle for Consortia.

Seven American universities, four information technology companies and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation have formed a consortia to "accelerate innovation and contribute to open source software research"

Open source software and open standards jointly developed by universities, government and industry can create a powerful platform for collaborative innovation. These principles are based on a balanced approach to IP management and should stimulate additional joint industry and university research projects.

It's all happening at Educa, currently running in Berlin. The four bodies are the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) (UK), SURF Foundation (NL), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DE) and Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF) (DK).

I'm not on the inside track on this, so I have no idea whether the Knowledge Exchange is going to be "joined up thinking" or "bureaucratic nightmare," but they don't even have a sane place-holder website at their launch, which isn't a good sign...

Links: JISC press release, egovmonitor.com and Open Access News.