Forty foundations for the future of open source

If you want to forecast the future of a philosophy or technology, you need look no further than the world of academia. What those who learned yesterday impart to today’s students will shape tomorrow. And in open source, there appear to be infinite tomorrows, with open source projects being undertaken by East Coasters like MIT, West Coasters like UCB and everyone else in between. Herewith, forty projects underway right now featuring students building the world of the future. This article is in the same vein as 50 Open Source success stories in Business, Education, and Government

1. A map in cyberspace

Sometimes you need a map to get around. The University of Minnesota’s open source development known as MapServer can be a guide, allowing the creation of “geographic image maps” which can direct users to content. A nice example of MapServer work can be seen at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources site, where 10,000-plus webpages, reports and maps can be found. There’s even a version in German – sehr gut!

2. On open source, ethics and morals

So open source makes for good software, but can it make for good deeds as well? The folks at University of South Carolina Aiken’s USCA Open Source Project sure think so. “Want to help make the world a better place?” the group offers on their homepage. “One way to do that is to put your computer's wasted CPU cycles to work on one of the many projects out there using the power of parallel processing or grid computing for analytical analysis.” Well, why are you waiting? Check out the USCA-supported World Community Grid for causes to which you can devote some unused computer juice.

3. That’s “Sakai,” not “Saki”

The Sakai Project is an open source project devoted to producing online course management, collaboration and research team support software – in other words, much of a university’s infrastructural needs – which involves institutions including the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford University, the Open Knowledge Initiative and the uPortal Project. At U. Mich. and Indiana U., Sakai software has been implemented. And the project got a big boost recently with IBM’s becoming a Sakai Commercial Affiliate.

4. Meanwhile, at Berkeley…

If it’s coming out of University of California Berkeley, you can bet it’s heavy. A program known as the “Open Source Quality Project” “investigates techniques and tools for assuring software quality: finding and removing defects in software systems, as well as improving current methodology for designing high-quality software systems at the outset.” A dozen tools/projects are available from the website and oodles and oodles of reports. It’s all totally heavy, man.

5. Please give, won’t you?

Know of any worthy open-source causes? Well, then, check out this page from devoted to supporting projects through referral links. Though the first-person writer remains unidentified, the page emanates from those open sources users at the Northwestern University Center for Atom-Probe Tomography.

6. Linux or Windows?

An interesting project undertaken by the Net Institute, under auspices of the Free/Opensource Research Committee recently took on the job of analyzing application and platform innovation incentives for open source and proprietary softwar platforms. Linux or Windows? Read the report to find out.

7. Connexions between Texas and Vietnam

Connexions is an open-source education project sponsored by Rice University. Its mission statement declares that Connexions is “an ongoing, large-scale experiment that will help demonstrate what is needed to effectively create and sustain the conditions for the use of educational and scholarly materials by educators and learners worldwide.” Currently underway is a large-scale deal begun in July with an agreement announced between the project and Vietnam Education Foundation, Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training and the Vietnam Advanced Software Company to deploy Connexions' web-based, open-source document creation and management system.

8. Using USU

Utah State University serves as home base for The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, an ambitious lot of open sourcers who host a “Creative Learning Environments Laboratory,” provide a repository of USU educational materials, and even offer online instructions for starting OpenCourseWare at your institution.

9. Flipping the calendar pages

It’s all about organization, right? Right! For all your calendar needs, then, check out the University of Washington’s UW Calendar project. UW Calendar promises to “support personal, public and group events, use existing open standards, and support web-based and other forms of access, including uPortal integration.” For example of the calendar program in action, you can check out Dalhousie University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or the University of Washington. (For login information to the U. Washington site, write Ellen Jensen at ellenj@cac.washington.edu.

10. Teaching teachers to teach online

Would you believe there’s an open source project developed at a university that serves the purpose of (gasp!) teaching? The Learning Online Network with Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach, a.k.a. LON-CAPA, is just such a program. Simply put, the service seeks ways to exploit the easy access of the internet by high-school students while simultaneously producing a product simple enough for fuddy-duddy teachers to program. There are curricula, assignment and multimedia animation available. And check out the physlets, Java-based applications used in teaching physics.

11. Speak to me

Admit it: You’ve always wanted to be able to have a conversation with your appliances. At Carnegie Mellon University, the Speech at CMU project shows the fruits of labor from what the institution calls “a historic position in computational speech research.” The CMU page indeed displays an impressive list of projects, groups, resources and software. Surely they’ll “continue to test the limits of the art.”

12. Speak to me some more

And speaking of speaking, there’s also the University of Edinburgh’s Festival Speech Synthesis Systems, free software for a multi-lingual speech synthesis workbench that runs on multiple platforms, and an open architecture for research in speech synthesis. Further information and directions for use are available here.

13. Keep on the GRASS

At Baylor, there’s some nice open source in the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System Geographic Information System, not surprisingly referred to as GRASS GIS. GRASS is a Geographic Information System used for data management, image processing, graphics production, spatial modelling, and visualization of many types of data. The system was originally created by the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories.

14. Getting with the POSSE

Penn Computer and Information Science department is taking security matters into its own hands. With “Portable Open Source Security Elements”, a team has been assembled from OpenBSD, OpenSSH, OpenSSL projects and Penn researchers. On tap is security-audited software. A security-focused UNIX variant hopes to “raise the bar for crackers.”

15. Drinking and driving

Like many good ideas (and most emanating from universities, to be sure), the Open Source Car project was fostered by beer. The brainchild of Markus Mertz, the NYU-based OSCar has set out to design and build a car via internet. Adhering to the principles of open source, Mertz’ manifesto launched the project with the promise that “all design results of the OSCar should be freely available to every member of the OSC community.” And this auto will even be environmentally friendly.

16. Chandler and Cosmo

The Educause Review has weighed in on open source projects in higher education, stating that “The increased interest in open source is well timed as higher education seeks a new model and as IT infrastructure becomes more homogenized.” Given as an example of such initiative is the non-profit organization Open Source Applications Foundation (www.osafoundation.org), which has recently produced a pair of notable projects, including the desktop PIM application known as Chandler and the server Cosmo 0.5.

17. Lots of DSpace in China

You want to see some ambitiousness in open source? Check out the China Digital Museum Project. This project carries of lofty goal “to enable … universities to provide infrastructure based on DSpace to store, manage, preserve and disseminate the digitized versions of [their] artifacts. In the final phase of the project, there will be approximately 100 university museums with digital artefacts stored in federated DSpace installations.” The project is a collaboration involving the Chinese Ministry of Education, Hewlett-Packard and several Chinese universities, with Beihang University as the main technical partner.

18. The Nittany Lions Share

Lionshare is a good, no-nonsense academic file-sharing system designed, built and implemented by Penn State. LionShare was built specifically with academic users in mind.

19. OKI is OK with IMS

Surely, the folks at MIT aren’t concerned with awards and prizes … oh, of course they are! Who doesn’t love to win awards and prizes? The well-known Open Knowledge Initiative has recently received ribbons for its efforts in Open Service Interface Definitions from the IMS Global Learning Consortium.

20. Sunny in Dartmouth

Folks at the Dartmouth College PKI Lab have teamed up with Sun Microsystems to produce security features for the OpenSolaris project. As a bonus, the Ivy League school is now offering an OpenSolaris-based Operating System course in its graduate-level computer science curriculum.

21. An Environment of Understanding

An upgrade to Tufts University’s Visual Understanding Environment project has just been released, the latest major release in a project first begun almost four years ago. VUE 1.5 is focused on creating flexible tools for integrating digital resources into teaching and learning. Promises Tufts IT: “Release 1.5 is a major step toward VUE 2.0 which will provide a range of new features including presentation tools, support for RDF and integration support for learning management systems and other educational software environments.” The project is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

22. WeBWorKin’ in New York state

Cornell College and Pace University began their collaborative research project entitled “Adapting and Extending WeBWorK for Use in the Computer Science Curriculum” last year and are now about halfway through a project due for completion in 2007. This project seeks to adapt and extend materials from NSF-funded projects on the WeBWorK web-based assessment system initially developed at the University of Rochester.

23. Kentucky Fried WeBWoRK

The creators of WeBWoRK recently announced an interesting development, namely that one Robert Molzon of University of Kentucky had made a WebWork Live CD available for download. The product promises to “allow you to turn any x86 computer into a webwork server in a matter of minutes.” Details are available over at U. Kentucky’s pages.

24. BYU projects for you

Has anyone noticed the work Brigham Young University’s computer science department has been undertaking in open source? Check out their project list, an impressive set of tools has been produced for system administrators and graphics programmers.

25. How’d ya like to be a Fulbright scholar?

The Fulbright School has jumped aboard the open source bandwagon and is now publishing its teaching and research materials known as FETP OpenCourseWare online. FETP stands for “Fulbright school Economics Teaching Platform” and that’s right, it’s based in Vietnam. FETP OpenCourseWare was reportedly inspired by MIT’s OpenCourseWare Initiative and was first implemented in 2003, making it the first program based on MIT’s call.

26. Madagascar, Vienna, Vancouver, Colorado

The Madagascar Project seems to have little to do with the actual Madagascar, but has touched much of the rest of the world. First introduced by Sergey Fomel as "Madagascar" in a workshop at the EAGE Conference in Vienna in June, Fomel and educators from the University of British Columbia and the Colorado School of Mines conducted a school and workshop in Vancouver on "Reproducible Research in Computational Geophysics” in August. The project is a new computational platform for geophysical data processing and reproducible numerical experiments and is currently hosted on-line by SourceForge.

27. In a state of Flux

University of Utah’s Flux Research Group works in a myriad of areas, including both local and distributed operating systems, networking, component-based systems, programming and non-traditional languages, compilers, information and resource security, and “even a pinch of software engineering and formal methods.” Flux produces and distributes usable versions of the developed software as well.

28. Aloha, Kuali

Actually out of Indiana University, the Kuali Foundation released the open source Kuali Financial System and launched the Kuali Research Administration project. The Kuali Financial System seeks to work toward establishing “a comprehensive series of modules for administrative functions in higher education.” Kuali Research Administration is based on an update of MIT’s COEUS system.

29. Aloha from Hawai’i, too

At University of Hawai’i, their Andrew W. Mellon-funded participation in the Kuali Project continues. The Kuali Financial System developed through U Hawai’i contributions to Kuali is based in part on Indiana University’s financial system design. The base Kuali modules are expected for release this year, and the two-year project completes the initial system in summer 2007.

30. Improvement for Asia and for the world

Who says the U.N. is no good? The United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology, a nonprofit research and education organization based in Macau, has been quite successful with their Global Desktop Project, a project devoted to increasing the number of open source developers in East Asia and on improved the open source desktop itself.

31. Go ahead, say “Shibboleth”

You’ve got to love open source named with Old Testament reference. In the book of Judges, the word “shibboleth” was used to determine a man’s origin. Today, it is defined as “a custom or usage of language regarded as distinguishing one group from others.” Naturally, the language of Shibboleth is open source and their business is security. Shibboleth is open source middleware software which provides Web Single SignOn across or within organizational boundaries.

32. Open for business

The Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently announced their creation and implementation of a suite of Open Archives Initiative-based metadata harvesting services, search services, and tools for discovery and retrieval of certain scholarly works. The university promises this well make visible “portions of the currently ‘hidden’ web of scholarly information resources.” A related project conducted by the University of Michigan Digital Library Extension Service works in tandem with UIUC. A comprehensive report of the project is available online.

33. MIT’s OpenCourseWare in China…

In terms of university open source, there is perhaps no more important move than MIT’s OpenCourseWare project. In accordance with the OCW’s original mission, today MIT is able to extend their network around the world. In China, MIT open source technology is now partaking in over 150 projects in China in everything from advanced mathematics to Xianjiang local history.

34. …in France and Japan, too

MIT OpenCourseWare is in use in La Republique via the country’s engineering institutions or “grandes ecoles.” Ten Paris Tech schools have joined the OpenCourseWare project. Of course, Japanese universities are not about to be left behind in open source adoption. MIT OpenCourseWare is in place at Keio University, Kyoto University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Osaka University, University of Tokyo, and Waseda University. The Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium was founded in May 2005.

35. Two lucky 13s

The Old Dominion University Digital Library Research Group undertakes DL research in hopes of “building and demonstrating novel digital library services.” It seems to be paying off: Old Dominion receives funding from heavy hitters like the NSF, NASA, ONR, US Navy, CIT, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Air Force Research Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratory. The result is some thirteen completed projects and thirteen more in development.

36. Openly studying open source And here’s a project on open source projects. Walt Scacchi and others at the University of California, Irvine are undertaking formal studies of the “informal world of open-source software development.” Under the banner of the Institute for Software Research, Scacchi and co. have run up quite a list of reports viewable online, tracing development of open source from its origins.

37. A tempest on a CD

Boston University’s Office of Information Technology advances the cause of Linux with their release of BU Linux 4.6, a.k.a. “Stormy,” so nicknamed because it was born on a night of New England thundershowers. The project’s output can be bought on BU campus on CD or freely downloaded, and is touted as containing “almost 3000 open source and free software packages drawn from the Fedora Project and from many other sources, combined with locally developed custom software and pre-configurations.”

38. A Piccolo for drawing

University of Maryland’s “Human-Computer Interaction Lab” has become fairly well-known for its Piccolo program, a layer built atop a lower level graphics API. For Java and C# programmers, this one makes it easier to build animated graphic applications.

39. Making every vote count

The U.S. presidential election of 2000 served as something of a wake-up call to those involved in the vote-tallying process. Funded by the NSF in 2003, the project “An Assessment of Voting Technology and Ballot Design” brings together folks from Universities of Maryland, Rochester and Michigan to study “voting technology and ballot design” with the help of open source.

40. The open source crop circle

So not technically an educational open source project per se, those wacky “Firefox fans” at Oregon State recently put heads together to launch the Firefox Crop Circle project, showing that these eager Beavers “have so much passion for Firefox that we want it to be visible from space!

Comments

[Laura]

Seems like too good an opportunity to miss to plug OpenLearn, the first large scale contribution to open-source open content in higher education in the UK built in the Moodle VLE. Learners have access to learning materials from The Open University and educators can use social networking and sensemaking tools, download, amend and re-upload learning resources under a Creative Commons licence.
http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn

[jack]

I recently found a very interesting website:
http://alreadylinked.com/
There you can purchase ad space for your Blog etc.

[weblist]

Hi,

for a few years, Baylor isn't involved in GRASS development any more... It's done by a worldwide team headquartered in Italy (http://grass.itc.it).