Open Source, Presentations/Speeches, and EDUCAUSE Live!

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.

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.

With many campuses now settling into the deployment and enhancement of core middleware, rich opportunities exist to leverage this infrastructure and enable collaborative applications. Activities are already underway to develop new, open-source tools in Web services, desktop video, peer-to-peer file sharing, list processors, calendars, and other areas that use this emergent infrastructure. This session will review the requirements for collaborative applications and discuss the status of the more promising tools and how campuses can prepare to use them.