KeyPerformanceIndicators

Key Performance Indicators for Open Source Technologist Role

I'm Dave Lane and I have the role of Open Source Technologist with the OERu/OER Foundation. To ensure that I am meeting the expectations of the Platinum OERu members and providing them with maximum value for their investment, I am proposing a series of Key Performance Indicators for the role, which make use of my capabilities and interests. These are up for discussion and will require further refinement.

• Care and Feeding of Existing Infrastructure: work with Jim Tittsler to ensure that the online resources that OERu members currently know and rely on are kept stable, secure, and vibrant, with minor enhancements over time.
• Introduce Innovative Open Technologies: Use my familiarity with the open source software world to prototype and offer trials of technologies that could foster collaboration and teaching. Provide tools to assist member institutions to trial (using OERF infrastructure) and replicate those which show promise, but under the control of interested member institutions.
• User-centric Strategy: Provide guidance in developing living strategies, using the OpenStrategies model with which I have experience to ensure that we develop easily communicated, validated, and deliberately user-focused plans-of-action.
• Federation not Monoculture: Rather than adopting a "one technology" or homogeneous approach (common with many current online closed education providers) instead describe possible models for federating heterogeneous ("decoupled") online education systems using open standards to be more open and distributed, showing a greater affinity for the structure of the Web itself.
• Open Business Models: Apply my experience in commercial open source software development to describing Open Business Models for OER.
• Speeding Product Development: Apply my experience working with open source projects to describe and encourage collaborative workflows (both synchronous - people working together at the same time - and asynchronous - people working together but at their own pace) and tools for collating course content ("Product") and communicating plans, priorities, and progress.
• General Marketing: Employ insights from my 15 years running (and marketing) a private open source company to develop a marketing campaign for the OERu. The goal: to reinforce the value to members of being part of the network, and to communicate that value to other institutions, motivating them to join for the mutual benefit of the entire membership. Celebrate the accomplishments of existing members and those individuals collaborating on their behalf by promoting members and individual contributors through featured profiles on the OERu website.
• Curriculum Development: develop curriculum materials for the First Year products describing what "Open" means in contexts like open learning, open policy, open source software, open standards.
• Case Studies for "Open": present some success stories for members and individuals who have adopted an "open" philosophy in their chosen areas of interest.
• Training Collaborators: producing training materials for some of the OERu's existing information sources (e.g. the OERu website's content management system), and collaboration tools.
• Promote OER and Openness: present combinations of the above at conferences to promote the OER concept more widely among prospective tertiary institution members and possible corporate or private sponsors/benefactors.