Using Open Source for Strategic Advantage

Special Guest

Alfred H. Essa
CIO of the Sloan School of Management at MIT

Alfred H. Essa is executive director of Information Technology and chief information officer at MIT's Sloan School of Management. As CIO, he is responsible for the overall leadership, management, and organization of Sloan's information technology and educational technology operations and initiatives. Essa is founder and chair of the executive board of .LRN (pronounced "dotLearn"), an open source project and e-learning platform based on the Open Architecture Community System toolkit. He is also the principal investigator of iLearn, a research effort to explore the relevance of Web services architectures in next-generation learning content management systems. iLearn is funded by iCampus, an MIT-Microsoft Research Alliance.More > >

Summary

Your host, Steve Worona, will be joined by Alfred Essa, and the topic will be "Using Open Source for Strategic Advantage."

What is open source and how can it used for strategic advantage? In this talk we will try to untangle the different senses of open source, consider some business and economic models for driving and using open source technologies, and discuss possible adoption strategies. In order to motivate the discussion we will examine a variety of approaches to open source development: in higher education, within companies and firms, and more widely on the internet. We will also consider several examples of emerging open source projects in higher education.

Related EDUCAUSE Resources

• open source
• Archives of past EDUCAUSE Live! seminars