16.1 Open source and open standards  (Page 5/10)

All this is happening outside of any direct Ministry direction (although naturally consistent with the eFramework SOA direction) and so I would argue these are very much institutional strategies but even more importantly the national virtual learning environment is underpinned by open source and open standards. When working with Ken Udas back in 2004 we set up (External Link) to help manage the various projects that make contribute to the overall framework. Being advocates of openness this was conceived as an open platform for anyone to use so it is heartening to see so many international projects there.

Anyway, I’m going on a bit here, excuse me ;-). Rob, perhaps I’ll see you at the IMS meeting in Queenstwon in November.

regards Richard Wyles

3. rob abel - september 22nd, 2007 at 7:22 pm

Hi Richard, Yes, I will see you in New Zealand . . . first time there and looking forward to it.

If you haven’t already, I hope you submit your work for a LIA Award:

(External Link)

Best, Rob

4. gavin baker - september 23rd, 2007 at 7:00 pm

The reality is that unless you are Google, or of a similar size and market share, you will have an extremely difficult time getting critical mass around your homegrown standard.

I would clarify that statement: if it competes with an existing standard . If you make a standard where there isn’t one, if it’s good, it may get adopted — see, e.g., RSS.

5. gavin baker - september 23rd, 2007 at 7:44 pm

Re: postulate 4, I feel like using FOSS should be strategic to the mission of the university in several ways. It would be helpful to articulate this well — to have a document that says, “This is why you should support this”. (That’s what I tried to do in my post on open access, for OER advocates.)

Who’s articulated that message well? If it hasn’t been done well yet, what would that message say? How does FOSS connect to the mission of the academy?

6. rob abel - september 23rd, 2007 at 7:55 pm

Hi Gavin, Thanks for the post. I would agree that something doesn’t have to be a standard or worked through a standards organization to get critical mass of adoption. Many approved standards - in fact the majority of them - never get a critical mass of adoption. So, the point I would make is that it’s a question of where you can get the right parties involved so they will adopt it. This is probably more important than if there is an existing standard already or not. A Google has such a huge market share and so many partners that follow their lead that they can create a snowball of adoption. This is why a large market-share leader generally needs to be convinced as to why they should spend time in standards organizations when they can dictate the actions of a large portion of the market.

My point relates to the educational open source efforts to date in that they have relatively small market influence and benefit greatly in a standards organization if it has enough participants to create that snowball effect.

I wasn’t familiar with the history of RSS - I found this site - can’t vouch for its accuracy: (External Link)