User:Mackiwg/WikiEducator

WikiEducator is one of the world's fastest growing and most productive wikis in the formal education sector. There are 80,796 registered users and you can make this one more by creating an account. WE are a community of educators with more than 70% of our users being teachers, lecturers or trainers working in the formal education sector.

As the founder of WikiEducator, I receive a fair number of emails and questions about the history of our project. This page provides a few links to resources on the early history and where you can find more information.

• I registered the wikieducator.org, wikieducator.net and wikieducator.com domains on 12 February 2006.
• I made my first edit on the demo site on 13 February 2006 - The day before Valentines day!
• You can read about our early history which was also published with a little more context under a blog post called WikiEducator: Memoirs, Myths, Misrepresentations and the Magic as part of the OSS and OER in Education Series. (Note: This was authored before COL implemented a Blogging policy confusing the boundaries between freedom of speech and corporate profile in a participatory website sponsored by the Agency.)
• In October 2007, I posted an audio slideshow about the WikiEducator project -- I should develop a new version with updates of the project and reflections on how well we've performed on our objectives.
• From the onset of WikiEducator, I was determined to implement a community governance model for the project. We started with a Interim International Advisory Board combined with a promise to our community that we would develop a Open Community Governance Policy and hold democratic elections for the establishment of the first WikiEducator Council once attaining 2,500 registered users. WE remained true to our community commitments and our election officer announced the outcome of the first WikiEducator elections on 19 September 2008. (These elections were an enlightening experience for an international agency concerned with issues of accountability and control in the unfamiliar territory of a global and open community project. Given the freedom of open source software, a parallel wiki installation was established by COL management in May 2008, preceding the announcement of WikiEducator's community elections in June 2008. Sadly, this move provided perceptual justifications to early concerns voiced from some commentators in non-commonwealth countries with reference to the international credibility of an open wiki project administered by an international agency. It was time to find a new home for our project.)
• The WikiEducator community had fast become an international exemplar for sustainable OER futures demonstrating the power of open communities collaborating at the heart of the educational endeavour: sharing knowledge freely. WE had outgrown our founding home at COL and I had the privilege of announcing a new and exciting future for WikiEducator on 24 September 2008 -- a new international home: The OER Foundation. WE provide more information about the shift in custodianship and reasons why this will promote and support our international endeavour for the social good of education.
• I have donated the wikieducator.org, wikieducator.net and wikieducator.com domains to the OER Foundation as an international non-profit organisation committed to open education so that we can ensure the future success of our collective work.
• The OER Foundation practices open philanthropy which means all our planning documents, funding proposals etc. are developed openly and transparently in the wiki.

We're making the future happen and am looking forward to the records we're going to break as we move forward on our journey to sustainable education futures!