A great call yesterday. Thanks to everyone who attended!

This meeting was slightly different to previous calls as we had a ‘meta community session’ or ‘open open session’ – an opportunity for different Open Education groups come along and introduce themselves. Each person gave a 4 minute pitch on their group, what it does, who it’s audience is, when it meets (online or offline), it’s unique selling points etc.

During the meeting we used an Etherpad for the agenda and notes.

Here is a list of the groups represented:

OER Discuss

Presented by: David Kernohan
Link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=OER-DISCUSS
Notes: OER-discuss arose out of a Jisc programme, is UK focused. It uses a #ukoer hashtag on Twitter. It is primarily focused around practitioners and experienced people. There is some discussion around what makes the group unique and valuable here.

P2PU

Presented by: Bekka Kahn
Link: https://p2pu.org/en/
Notes: P2PU is a distributed organisation with 4 staffers from around world. They use a tool called discourse – learning tool. There is a community aspect of the organisation at http://www.community.p2pu.org. Creative Commons is a proud P2PU partner through the School of Open: http://schoolofopen.p2pu.org.

Open coalition

Presented by: Bekka Kahn
Link: http://open-coalition.org/
Notes: It is a loose affiliation of groups – housed at WikimediaUK

W3C open Linked Education group

Presented by: Stefan Dietze
Link: http://www.w3.org/community/opened/
Notes: Existed for some time, set up by Maddie Soloman form Pearson. Covers linked data and education, linked universities and other initiatives. Came out of the LinkedUp Project.

Association for Learning Technology Open Ed Special Interest Group

Presented by: Alastair Clark
Link: https://www.alt.ac.uk/get-involved/special-interest-groups/oer-sig
Notes: Alt-C is the main conference. The sig is work on the ground. Every 2 months there is a webinar. Membership – some overlap with OER-discuss, lots of newbies.
OER conference in UK now very closely linked: “OER sig is conference glue”. Currently no chairs for OER16!

OER-Research Hub

Presented by Beck Pitt
Link: OER-Research Hub: http://oerresearchhub.org and OER map: http://oermap.org
Notes: OER Research Hub gathers research on the impact of open educational resources (OER) on learning and teaching practices.

Software Carpentry

Presented by: Greg Wilson
Link: http://software-carpentry.org/
Notes: The Software Carpentry Foundation is a non-profit organization whose members teach researchers basic software skills. We run workshops all over the world, provide open access teaching materials, and run an instructor training program. This is where our instructors are, http://software-carpentry.org/workshops/previous.html is where we’ve been, and http://software-carpentry.org/pages/dashboard.html is the state of our lessons. Lots of instructors – uses Github – online training course – also work on educational psychology – why open is better.

Open Policy Network

Presented by: Cable Green
Link: https://openpolicynetwork.org
Notes: Co-ordinated by Creative Commons. Also Institute for Open Leadership: https://openpolicynetwork.org/iol/. The products of grants should be openly licensed – all publicly funded should be openly licensed
All data cc0. We move the money and change the environment. Sub grants to OPN members in next few months – call for global experts. How to JOIN the Open Policy Network: https://openpolicynetwork.org/about/#join. 14 fellows at the inagural IOL. Will be hosting the second IOL in late 2015 / early 2016 – likely in eastern Europe-ish.

Cetis and Open Scotland

Presented by: Lorna Campbell,
Links: https://lornamcampbell.wordpress.com/ CETIS, http://www.cetis.ac.uk/ and Open Scotland, http://openscot.net/ & LRMI: http://www.lrmi.net
Notes: Cetis is the Centre for Education Technology and Interoperability Standards. We are a technology advisory service based in the UK, but providing education technology consultancy services internationally. Cetis works in the area of open standards, open education technology, and open education policy and practice. Cetis provided the technology strategy and support to the UKOER Programmes and produced an open book Into The Wild synthesising the programmes’ technical outputs. We have recently worked on the Leanring Resource Metadata Initiative with Creative Commons and the Assoication of Education Publishers and are now taking this work forward with the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Cetis is also one of the founding partners of the Open Scotland initiative. Open Scotland is a voluntary cross sector initiative that aims to raise awareness of open education, encourage the sharing of open educational resources, and explore the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education. We have also produced the Scottish Open Education Declaration, and open community draft based on the UNESCO / COL Paris

Școala Mea

Presented by: Victoria Vlad
Links: http://scoalamea.md/ and http://www.expert-grup.org/en/proiecte/item/916-gpsa-moldova/916-gpsa-moldova
Notes: Work on social accountability, open data on budgets in all schools in Moldova – trying to grow interest.

ICORE: International Community for Open Research and Open Education

Presented by: Christian Stracke
Links: http://www.ICORE-online.org
Notes: ICORE = International – need to combine open research and open education, pushing people to go for openness – joining with UNESCO and OCD. Open discovery space in showcasing how open education can work – biggest initiative on open education. Organisers of LINQ conference.

Openwords

Presented by: Marc Bogonovich
Link: http://openwords.com/
Notes: Foreign language app for – all content open source, revenue models for open data

Open Knowledge Ireland

Presented by: Denis Parfenov
Notes: Currently working on open computing course, Map Lesotho: https://maplesotho.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/tension-excitement-mad-chatter-and-a-major-milestone/

POERUP

Presented by: Paul Paul Bacsich (apologies – couldn’t make call)
Link: http://www.poerup.info/
Notes: For general information it may be useful to you know that we are just starting a study project for the European Parliament on “Adult Education and OER in the EU” (for which we seek input, though just 8 out of 28 EU countries will be studied in any detail) and just finishing the final report on SharedOER for the EU’s Joint Research Centre IPTS unit. There is a bit more on the wiki page http://poerup.referata.com/wiki/Beyond_POERUP. POERUP and Beyond will be attending OER15 (at least 4 papers on POERUP and related topics) and hope to send someone to Open Education Global in Banff in April where we just heard we have two papers accepted.

Wikimedia

Presented by: Fabian Tompsett, Wikimedia UK (apologies – couldn’t make call)
Link: https://www.wikimedia.org/
Notes: Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world. Wikimedia education programme: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education

GO-GN

Presented by: Robert Schuwer (apologies – couldn’t make call)
Link: http://oer-unescochair-ounl.ning.com/
Notes: The Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) is an initiative from the UNESCO Chair in OER at the Dutch Open Universiteit, initiated in collaboration with the UNESCO / COL Chair in OER at Athabasca University (Canada).

Score

Presented by: Antonio Martínez-Arboleda (apologies – couldn’t make call)
Links: Score: http://www.open.ac.uk/score/ and http://www.open.ac.uk/score/fellows
Notes: SCORE was based at the Open University and funded by HEFCE as a three year project (2009-2012) to support individuals, projects, institutions and programmes across the higher education sector in England as they engage with creating, sharing and using open educational resources (OER).

Our next meeting will be in approximately 2 months. Details to follow.