Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Summary of the Sloan - Berklee dotLRN meeting

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Posted by Rafael Calvo on
First, I want to congratulate Sloan and Berklee for their commitment to innovation. As Al said, opensource  "is a weird admixture of anarchy and tyranny", and I am very aware that this means risks (and opportunities) for their clients. Universities as well as many other large organizations need to manage risks, together with budgets and delivery dates and be strict about them.

These two universities are always at the forefront of technology (MIT) and arts (Berklee), and this represents a great opportunity for the openacs community. If they are successfull the whole opensource community will be successfull.

The OACS community will soon have one of the top Business Schools and one of the top music schools in the world using dotLRN/OACS. We will have the largest enviromental movement in the world (Greenpeace) using OACS and we have companies like Siemens that use ACS and could eventually use OACS as well. These are great news!

I believe the community is very aware and happy for this.

I also agree with Caroline and we must think of dotLRN as a "brand" of OACS. It is the killer application that the project needs and will help develop.

On the other hand, the developers I have talked with are trying to find ways of collaborating with openforce, or at least of not reinventing the wheel. Since OACS is very modular the best way I found of doing this is building things that other people is not (previous consultation with Don and Ben). I think that is a good way to work for all. If people working in openforce and Berklee tell Don (or post it in the bboard) what they are working on, we can try not to overlap.

Finally, there are other universities that would like to be more involved in the dotLRN project, and would be able to add value to it. Al and Caroline had planned to be more open about the dotLRN governance, but I haven't heard much about it. How can other universities participate more in the "strategy" aspect of the "brand"? I am consciously trying to separate this from the purely Software engineering aspects, since I don't think that IMS compliance, learning objects, etc,.. are issues that the OACS cares much about. How can we collaborate so other universities start using it?