Location:
Home » Wiki » Open (Openness) Definition
Community

Open (Openness) Definition

The current working scope of interest of the The Openness Constituent Group:

From critical IT services to educational content, distributed models based on openness are challenging higher education's traditional approaches. The Openness Constituent Group focuses on the emergence and adoption of open technologies, practices, policies, and initiatives, and provides a forum for information gathering and idea exchange for all issues related to the development and use of open resources in academic (teaching and learning) and administrative environments. Topics include but are not limited to free and open source software, open content, open educational resources, open courseware, open standards, open textbooks, and management practices such as open business and enterprise 2.0.

Task 1.0

  1. 1.1 Identify the environment in which the EDUCAUSE Openness CG's accreditation shall be measured and applied.
  2. 1.2 Identify the audience to whom the EDUCAUSE Openness CG should communicate our assessments and findings.
  3. 1.3. Explain our interests and purpose for undertaking this effort.

 

Task 2.0

2.1 Identify current "open" resources/initiatives. 2.2 Define any common attributes associated with resources/initiatives promoting openness. 2.3 Resolve a definition for each attribute. 2.4 Establish criteria for validating the existance of open atributes. 2.5 Establish metrics for assessing if the criteria have been met.

Resources

Other definitions of "Open"

Also see:

EDUCAUSE Openness wiki

Audience, anyone?
Submitted by Bruce V. Gilbert (Drake University) on January 21, 2010 - 6:55pm.

I would argue (and will, on the listserv) that even something as basic as "attributes" are meaningless until we settle on a few other things, such as: 

  1. Environment (Higher Ed, I presume?)
  2. Audience (here I would argue that the audience should NOT primarily be proponents of Openness! No "preaching to the choir")
  3. Purpose (by this I mean, are we trying to define (and thus defend) ALL the different kinds of openness, or, rather, create a "common ground" of concepts that all the flavors of Openness share)
Seems like this definition of
Submitted by Sean Keesler (eCornell) on January 3, 2010 - 1:27pm.

Seems like this definition of openness here is referring to a model for governance similar to distributed or federated model. There are likely other contexts in which to discuss openness (more familiar but perhaps related to governance) such as:

  • an open license to use (code/content) and the terms that accompany that it
  • a frank and candid discussion of some matter, or at least a disposition to have such a discussion
  • a lack of obstruction to further progress
  • pending further discussion, unknown as of yet
 
© Copyright 1999-2012 EDUCAUSE
  Unless otherwise noted, EDUCAUSE holds the copyright on all materials published by the association, whether in print or electronic form. In certain cases the work remains the intellectual property of the individual author(s) (see Special Circumstances). Content from conference speeches, presentations, blogs, wikis and feeds reflect the opinions of the author, and not necessarily those of EDUCAUSE or its members.