Collaboraid dotLRN seminar
Coming to you live via wifi this is a live coverage of Collaboraid’s dotLRN seminar.
Lars Pind has managed to bring together 70 people from 11 countries around the globe for this seminar on the OpenACS based opensource dotLRN learning management platform
Ongoing picture coverage in this special mblog section

After the coffee break all the developers are introducing themselves. Developers are working on projects like SCORM compliance, openaces oracle 9i database adapter, jabber integration, etc. Developers are from everywhere – Norway, Finland, Sweden, France, USA, Denmark, etc.

Some notes from the discussions:
“Universities should be contributing to the digital commons and give back to the community – especially when funded with public funds”

“Diversified development means usable and robust in the end.”

Emphasis on the needs of having a lot of professional developers around an opensource project – a needed step in the opensource project lifecycle in order to make it a viable choice for a large institutions in the long run.

“Distributed development is now possible, but we can’t really imagine the new models yet”.

“There’s a need for advocacy and public support of the opensource projects to avoid the Microsoft scare”.

“The opensource sustainability argument”. Opensource is in the end more sustainable, but needs a continuing thriving active community in order to make the sustainability model to work”

But what’s the critical mass for a project like dotLRN?

We need both active users and active developers.

“Developers are not waiting for the educationel itch to popup as opposed to a lot of the other opensource projects. This is an experiment in a very focused opensource application – but we need to build a much wider community in order to make dotLRN work – not only developers.”

Analysis of the community. A healthy community. New developers and new installations. [can bechmarks be created to monitor critical mass for an opensource project?]

“So who’s gonna write the O’reilly book” [laughter in the audience]

Why would anyone accept a closed box they can’t customize themselves?

Discussing system security on opensource projects – reflects that Windows is not allowed on the MIT campus for enterprise applications because of security issues. Only Linux, Solaris, etc. is allowed.
So it’s not really an open source specific issue. Security is an issue for all applications and all developments projects – proprietary or not.

Break with water and cake – and now it’s demo time:

Interesting with a collaborative demo format with lots of developers kicking in with explanations and handling the questions from the audience. But tough to keep structure and pace in the presentation. And tough to keep notes!

Roadmap time. Lot’s of collaborative projects extending the dotLRN platform funded by different institutions and organizations.