I. Purpose
Prepare for the transition of the Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.) from a project at MIT to a sustainable community organization, which will be either internal or external to MIT. Create and implement the on-going structure and processes by which O.K.I. growth and development can occur in an efficient and cost-effective way.
II. Principal Investigators
The PIs of the O.K.I. Phase II project consist of representatives of the organizations that have helped to instigate and define O.K.I. Phase II.
- Vijay Kumar, MIT
- Llorenc Valverde, UOC
III. The O.K.I. Mission:
Foster interoperability among educational, business, commercial and open-source software used in different and evolving enterprise and personal computing environments.
IV. Accomplishments to date:
1. O.K.I. has developed a suite of Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs), which are specifications that define a “Service-Oriented Architecture”. Several institutions are using these specifications as an enterprise architecture and integration strategy.
2. OSIDs have been applied to integrate many educational applications with a variety of content publishers and have become a globally accepted strategy for repository integration.
3. O.K.I. has created, and is still a focal point of, a growing and active repository integration community.
4. O.K.I. is supporting its global community of adopters through educational resources in the form of documents, presentations and seminars.
V. Project Goals:
1. To develop, demonstrate and implement the specifications of O.K.I. to realize sustainable educational opportunities and actively identify new opportunities that would benefit from O.K.I.’s successful models, processes and influence.
2. Extend the functionality of O.K.I.’s interoperability specifications and increase their adoption to meet the requirements of more complex and varied educational applications critical to the community.
3. Develop O.K.I. into a sustainable organization which has increased investment and increasing awareness and creditability.
4. Use the example of the successful efforts to date with Content Repository interoperability using OSIDs as a model to build additional communities around other OSIDs of critical interest for educational applications.
5. Evolve the OSID specifications to achieve a higher degree of interoperability and meet the changing requirements of the community.
6. Provide more high-quality educational material on software interoperability and the application of OSIDs to better support the growing OSID developer community
7. Improve community collaboration to ensure active problem-solving and to extend the network effect of O.K.I.
VI. Essential O.K.I. Sustainment Activities and Key Project Deliverables:
1. Develop the organizational, funding and membership modelts for a steady-state O.K.I. community organization, including securing additional investment in key transition activities.
2. Clarify and resolve key Intellectual Property and licensing issues, for example: “who owns the OpeniWorld brand?”, “Can the IP for the OSIDs themselves be transferred to an external entity?”, etc…
3. Develop marketing tools, documents and events which will:
• Bring new customers and investors into the community;
• Provide a means to share information amongst users;
• Market the O.K.I. Transition project and resulting community organization;
• Help prospective users understand how O.K.I. will solve particular technical problems; and
• Assist in event development and management
4. Develop a more reliable and functional O.K.I. Website
• Identify a service provider for the O.K.I. website;
• Redesign the O.K.I. website to support the O.K.I. community in an interactive fashion (the site is currently broken); and
• Update the content of the website and keep current as a primary source of information and support for current and prospective users.
5. Engage customers in determining the components of an OSID distribution.
• Develop appropriate manuals and technical documentation for O.K.I. OSIDs
• Explore additional developer resources, such as example code and test harnesses
6. Engage the community in refining, publishing and ratifying Version 3 of the OSIDs
8. Determine the process for creating and registering “type” agreements. Type agreements are a community-specific requirement of the OSID specification.
9. Determine process for creating and validating language bindings of the OSIDs, i.e. PHP and Java.
10. Identify and secure additional self-funded projects, which will benefit the O.K.I. community.
VII. Timeline
By December 2008 it is expected that a community organization and institutional programs will be established indicating the successful conclusion of this project as well as O.K.I.’s ongoing sustainment.
