| [ospo.zone] Hello, introducing Apereo (and me) |
Hello OSPO Alliance/Zone community,
I wanted to introduce the Apereo Foundation as a new member of the OSPO Alliance and myself as its representative here. Apereo is a US-based non-profit that promotes and facilitates open source software development, adoption, and collaboration within higher education. The Foundation hosts several "edtech" projects, including the popular Learning Management System Sakai, a "standard" single sign-on protocol Central Authentication System (CAS), Opencast, a lecture capture, video editing, and presentation platform, and many others.
Apereo member institutions (colleges and universities) span five continents, with 300+ adopters and 1500+ contributors. Founded in 2012, our work has primarily focused (perhaps to our detriment) on higher education, and we are now extending our partnerships, interactions, and engagement with the broader open source community.
The emergence of corporate-oriented OSPOs is significantly
influencing higher education. While this trend is beneficial in
advancing open source software within colleges and universities, a
corporate model and value proposition may not be the best fit for
higher ed.
Apereo's goal in working with OSPO Alliance and its members is to
understand better the potential of OSPOs to support the breadth of
an institution's initiatives, not just in information technology,
but also open educational resources (open textbooks, open access
journals, etc.), open research and data, open courses and
curriculum, and other areas were collaboration and co-creation
yield greater innovation, broader access, and increased quality.
Quickly, I currently serve as E.D. at Apereo with 30+ years in and around higher education. Before Apereo, I was with the OSI for just over ten years. Prior to that, I was CTO at the University of Massachusetts and CIO for the State University of New York. I started my career at UCLA as a programmer analyst. I also taught at SUNY Albany and served on my local school board.
Looking forward to the discussions,
Patrick