Exploring Team Tasks

Oops - people are complaining that I haven't posted much lately (well anything at all actually). Been in wall to wall meetings for the last seven days - just one day off. Started last Monday iN Athens and I'm back here again this week. I will try to report a bit on all of them in next three days.

Sunday (a week ago) , I travelled to Athens for a meeting of the Special Interest Group on Open Source
Software for Education in Europe (SIGOSSEE). SIGOSSEE is a two year project funded by the European Commission.

There are nine partners in the SIGOSSEE project coming from eight different countries. On the whole it is a great project. People doing something they believe in and with a genuine popular appeal. And the partners have lots and lots of ideas. But that can also be a problem. We spend a lot of time on the new ideas but are not so good at actually implementing them. tis time we collectively vowed that we would do what we agreed and tried at least to be realistic. Time will tell.

The second day of SIGOSSEE meetings are given over to a public event - the nature of which very much depends on the partner running it. It sort of works - in Limerick we got some 50 participants for a 2 and a half day event organised in the University. In Catalonia, the University of Pompeu Fabre was ambitious - organising a full day event attended by some 50 participants. We didn't really have a fixed formula for these meetings before we started - but have sort of evolved a pattern of one or two speakers from the partnership - on different topics at each meeting together with four or five speakers form the host country. Its the latter that have been inspiring. At every meeting we get more of an impression of the imagination and creativity which is going into developing open source applications for learning - often with only a local market at present. I sort of started out with a centralist position - believing that what we needed was more organised European collaboration on OSS products and projects. I am coming to the conclusion that there is a case for diversity - even if it does involve some reinventing of the wheel - as in the case of the many VLEs being developed.

Firstly people like a local product - someone they can contact in their own language and locality. Secondly, universities are using OSS projects for teaching and research. But thirdly, the very number of OSS products may be a problem for concentrating resources and for marketing but it does lead to innovation and imagination coming back to play.

One thing I would be concurred with is whether Source Forge allows adequate representation of all these different applications - particularly in native langauge versions.

Anyway - back to the subject. In Greece some 100 participants registered for the public seminar, including, according to gossip, the national rep of Microsoft. As always hap[pens when there is no registration fee, only about 50 per cent turned up. Never mind - the speakers were excellent and the discussion ( according to reports - I had to leave before the end) lively. The next move George Bekiaridis from Ergon KEK tells me, is to set up a Greek network on OSS in education. Over the next week I will post links to some of the presentation in this blog.