Open Source Software

Open Source Software: An Interview with Richard Wyles of Eduforge
By Terry Freedman

Eduforge is an open source community which originated in New Zealand. I conducted this interview with Richard Wyles, one of its co-founders, via email.

TF: How and when did the idea for Eduforge originate?

RW: In late 2003 I was involved in putting a funding proposal together focused on selecting and then contributing to e-learning application software for use by the New Zealand tertiary education sector. We started by investigating learning management systems and now the project team is very active in the Moodle community. With a consortium of 8 institutions (which has now grown to 20), we recognised at the project proposal stage that we needed an online project space with particular features to enhance transparency and collaboration.

We looked around but there was nothing that was a close fit so we developed Eduforge initially just using the GForge code base.

TF: What are its aims and objectives?

RW: The primary goal of Eduforge (http://www.eduforge.org/) is to establish an environment that brings together educators and education technologists to collaborate, share ideas, and develop open source software for education. The challenge is to make the site useful and friendly for technologists and educators.

TF: What geographical area is it intended for?

RW: It’s an international resource for anyone, although admittedly some language packs are more developed than others. Initially we hosted Eduforge here in New Zealand but have shifted the site to the US to eliminate latency issues that some users were experiencing.

TF: Could you explain what you mean by "latency issues"?

RW: When we had the site hosted at our facilities in Wellington, New Zealand then users in South Africa and elsewhere thought that Eduforge was slow. That's partly because the SA network is not as developed as European and the US. Because Eduforge has a lot of dynamic publishing caching techniques are less useful.

In short, since most Internet traffic is routed through the States we thought we'd eliminate the extra hop down and back to NZ. It has made a difference to our international users.