Infrastructure, Tools, and Sustainability

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 Allen, Nichole Saad, Peter Suber, Ross Mounce, Amy Brand, Mark McBride, Sharon Leu, Brianna Schofield

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.

Examples of OER Sustainability:

SUNY OER Services campus sustainability project