iLab (xLabs?) Founders

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The iLab Consortium founders meeting will be held at MIT on Friday June 19, 2009 to discuss the formation of an international consortium to foster the creation and worldwide sharing of online laboratories.

Group

As the usage of online experiments gains traction in the educational community, there is increasing interest in developing such labs on a common infrastructure. A unified architecture is essential to convert the current tremendous interest for online experiments into an economy of labs that can be efficiently shared around the world. You and your institution have expressed interest in and support for the iLab Shared Architecture. At present, MIT continues to develop the iLab infrastructure largely alone, but your university and others are now creating the majority of new online labs.

The goal of this meeting is to convene a group of universities and corporate sponsors to explore the merit in establishing a consortium to further iLab development and dissemination.

If the attendees favor the idea of a consortium, we would also plan to discuss (1) the critical path to launching such an organization, (2) immediate next steps for the founders to take, (3) the complementary roles of academic and corporate members in the consortium, and (4) plans for joint fund-raising and development. We are limiting this first founders' meeting to universities and companies that we expect to play a leading role in launching the consortium. If we jointly decide to launch an iLab Consortium, we would plan to hold a meeting for a much larger audience within six months. At this second meeting, we would expect to address the following issues:

The xLabs Consortia (working title only!) is being established to promote the development of remote laboratories, including establishing a common architecture.

Meetings

• iLabs Founders Meeting 1: June 19th 2009, MIT, Cambridge, US
• Global Online Laboratory Consortium: January 27th, 28th 2010, UTS, Sydney, Australia

Workgroup Members and mailing lists

General Consortium Founders Mailing List: ilab-founders@mit.edu

• Governance Working Group
• Technical Working Group
• Economics Working Group
• Education Working Group
• How to encourage and support the creation of new online labs and curricular
  materials for them;
• How to design an efficient mechanism for sharing, exchanging and trading access
  to online labs;
• How to support communities of scholars created around iLabs;
• How to lead the evolution and development of the iLab Architecture; and
• How to position the consortium with regard to other online laboratory projects.