Note: The original scope of this theme was Infrastructure and Tools. Sustainability was a separate theme, but the recommendation of the Sustainability and Incentives team was to integrate it with Infrastructure and Tools,
Meeting #1: Define key questions/considerations on this theme which the Open 2020 Working Group should address.
Team: Nicole, Peter S, Amy
Who else should be part of the infrastructure conversation?
- Voices from the global south
- Funders, especially if they understand interoperability
- Coders, such as CoKo (Kristen Ratan), and someone with history in major open ed tech developments (e.g., Kim Thanos)
- Students/users
- People who specialize in robust preservation
What are the work products?
- We need an inventory of existing OER tools and platforms, including licensing. This could be included as part of the IOI census.
- Best practices in contracting with proprietary platforms
- Value proposition for why you should use open infrastructure
- Outline of consortial ownership model for relevant infrastructure
- Openness metric/index
- "Almetric" styles indicators of OER usage/uptake
- Standard format for syllabi (e.g., to support Open Syllabus Project and interoperability)
What are the core questions?
- Sustainability: what is the role of the academy? How to move beyond well-meaning volunteerism? How to weigh and the pros and cons of proprietary alternatives, and service providers for open source solutions?
- How do we learn from the failures of the past in open infrastructure? When should we be willing to compromise?
Definitions
- What do we mean by infrastructure, which is a layered stack? Platforms, software, tools. standards, metadata. What about pure content – is it infrastructure too? Not clear, need to distinguish "particle" and "wave" forms of content. Perhaps we're really talking about digital infrastructure here.