Al,
Thank you for opening the discussion. I think it is a very important one since the community and number of end users is growing quickly, it is becoming a more viable solution for more institutions. These institutions (mostly universities, but some corporates) are looking for ways to reduce "perceived" risk. I think this consortium is one of the most important tools for achieving this. I am quoting the perception bit, because I want to make a differentiation between the technical and the business parts. Technically the consortium has no influence in quality, except for bringing money to improve the system. But, businesses want to know that other institutions are using the system: the CTO needs to feel that he is not along if he goes the .LRN way. The consortium should give these people (and institutions) the feeling of support that this community has done so well at the developers level.
Going back to your questions:
* What should be its goals?
- Provide communty of institutional "aliances" that can provide support to existing and incoming members. Aliances here are based on informal collaboration around a common goal (improve teaching, reduce cost, etc using .LRN)
- Be a face (not the only one) that can be used to bring in new players. A call from the CIO of Sloan, or a manager from Heidelberg, or some of the people I expect to see there can make wonders in many places. If you have several people like these (managers & academics) you can do even more.
- Coordinate investment (as mentioned earlier)
- Advocacy at the non technical level. Most of the community is based on programmers with probably very litle reach to business managers. The consortium my help channel advocacy at this level.
* What should be the criteria for membership?
- Like you said, I think members should be those "organizations" that use (and hopefully conributes) to .LRN.
What are organizations? Of course, companies and Unviversities but maybe smaller business units as well.
A condition of membership could be that the consortium is allowed to mention the institution as a user of .LRN. This is not always trivial.
* How should it be related to openACS etc.
OpenACS is the framework on top of which we are building .LRN. Improvements to .LRN will improve the framework so they are very intercorrelated, but they are different in several ways: OpenACS is the technical community, the consortium (as I see it) is more business. Also the software is somewhat different: in the WebCT vista product BEA is the framework and WebCT the Application built on top. The two are different companies. I think we can do better by a better integration (business and technical) of the two layers.
I leave it here to see what people think
cheers
