RW: Eduforge uses a combination of Gforge, PHP Wiki, and Serendipity code bases to deliver a suite of project and communication tools. It aims to be part of the landscape that is supporting open source, standards, and content in education.

So, in many ways the philosophies are aligned with those of SourceForge although our membership structure and procedures are significantly different. There’s many other initiatives out there like http://www.opencourse.org/ or the Shuttleworth Foundation (http://www.tsf.org.za/) which is doing an enormous amount with open source for education, focused on needs in Africa.

Eduforge is probably more akin to an education focused Sourceforge with the tool-sets it offers.

TF: Do you think that open source represents a viable and sustainable alternative to commercial products for use in schools, given support issues?

RW: Dropping the total cost of ownership for e-learning infrastructure clearly assists sustainability for all concerned. However, it’s true that few organisations are currently geared towards the open source paradigm. Support models need to be developed that provide the necessary expertise, quality assurance and service delivery.

I believe a co-ordinating neutral entity can hugely assist collaborative consortium or cluster deployments. For example, the NZOSVLE project now has 20 partners. Six institutions, representing approximately 50,000 students, have their open source e-learning infrastructure supported on an education "server farm" thereby lowering costs for hardware and support even further. The benefits are that we can apply the appropriate expertise and collaborate on common services such as e-portfolios, webmail, learning object repositories etc.

The key is to have a light structure that connects consortium partners or users with a common need, technology service providers and the open source communities from which core code is being adopted and contributed back. This approach can deliver superior service levels compared to some of the experiences some organisations have with commercial vendors.

In addition, what we're finding is that collaborative models start to deliver benefits elsewhere such as professional development and course development.