[education-wg] getting started

[James Salsman]

On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 8:25 AM, Mike <mhuffman at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Let's get started by forming the strategies group. Who would like to work on
> developing strategies for the education workgroup. Please e-mail me if
> you're interested in participating.

Mike, I am, but I have a question about your specification: "This
group will be responsible for identifying strategies that can work
with open source software as well as prioritizing how this gets put
together. Most of the strategy discussions will be public on the
listserv and everyone's input will be required. However a smaller
group will refine the focus and determine which strategies need to be
addressed first."

Is anyone opposed to using IETF-style "rough consensus and running
code" decision making, which precludes the absolute authority of a
smaller group with decision making authority?  We should have rules
requiring interoperable implementations and open source code, free
from both copyright and patent restrictions.  Does anyone object to
placing rules such as those at
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2026#page-13 and Section 11 of
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html as being paramount above any
group or person?  Even against years of unanimous opposition?

Those requirements are the reasons why I've recommended the use of
http://microformats.org/wiki/gift for a textual assessment standard
(GPL-licensed Moodle can import and export it) and BSD-licensed CMU
Sphinx II for the pronunciation and reading analog described at
http://tinyurl.com/osl08 -- and I must insist that we remain congruent
with our underlying mission to provide open educational resources.
Giving a subset of the group decision making power greater than the
whole makes sense for day-to-day work and subdivision of labor, but I
hope we will have some rules for educational resources, whether they
are code or data or both, human-readable or otherwise, that we all
have to abide by.

Best regards,
James Salsman