Web Seminars Contributed by EDUCAUSE and OSS

Going back to the beginning and revisiting how current practices developed over time can help us understand where we are now, and where we are headed. When viewed in this light, open source licenses and business models stop looking like aberrations and start looking like part of the natural progression of an industry.

This session reviews the work that's currently taking place to solve the problem of practical multiplatform sharing of calendar and scheduling data over the Internet. OSAF engineer Lisa Dusseult has introduced CalDAV, a proposal to the IETF standards body to extend the existing WebDAV standard to handle rich event-based data. CalDAV has been very well received and work is under way at OSAF, Mozilla, Oracle, Novell (as part of the newly open sourced Hula project), the University of Washington, and other places to implement this new standard in both clients and servers.

The session will also discuss CalConnect, a new consortium established to promote interoperable calendar and scheduling standards. In January 2005, CalConnect sponsored an interoperability event where several early versions of clients and servers successfully exchanged calendar information. The hope is that these efforts will lead to open standardization and implementations that will provide end users with the same simplicity in sharing calendars with friends and co-workers that they now enjoy in sharing e-mail messages.

In just over a year, the Sakai Project has become one of higher education's most visible open source projects. With an aggressive agenda to develop and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE), the Sakai Project has put out two major software releases, developed an Educational Partner's Program with 70 members around the world and five commercial affiliates, and demonstrated a model for community source software development among colleges and universities.

Indiana University and the University of Michigan independently chose the open source path and joined forces with MIT and Stanford and, with a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, formed the Sakai Project. Both institutions are well into implementation and extension of open source teaching and learning systems. This session will report on the Sakai Project software, the strategy choices at Michigan and Indiana, and what's next.

Dave Lambert will examine the current trend toward collaborative open source software development (Sakai, Chandler, uPortal, and so forth) in higher education, exploring issues critical to assessing the long-range impact on campus systems. His assessment will include an historical perspective, locate this new paradigm in relation to the traditional buy-versus-build choices, and discuss issues related to institutional deployment and life-cycle support.

What is open source and how can it used for strategic advantage? In this talk we will try to untangle the different senses of open source, consider some business and economic models for driving and using open source technologies, and discuss possible adoption strategies. In order to motivate the discussion we will examine a variety of approaches to open source development: in higher education, within companies and firms, and more widely on the internet. We will also consider several examples of emerging open source projects in higher education.