Ira Fuchs from Mellon is talking about Community Source, and the larger dynamic within the community — successes, attitudes, opportunities, and risks.

zotero is interesting, both as an example of an open-source project that like Firefox has had viral adoption, with a strong community marketing and communications effort. I also wonder if there’s a convincing Sakaibrary integration possibility, perhaps a direct gateway into the Citations Manager tool that let you save or push bookmarks into the citations manager.

Vertox – a plug-in for a plug-in is interesting. Video tagging is a neat application, though in many respect I’ve always thought the combination of OCR and voice recognition to auto index text & words mentioned in a clip, and index them would be potentially more transformative than manual tagging & citing.

At the Community Source reception cosponsored by JA-SIG, Sakai, Kuali it was uplifting to see the number of people participating. CIOs, managers, developers, vendors were all present in abundance. It was also clear from conversation at the reception that open-source in the Higher Ed is breaking into new areas. While there’s no question infrastructure and back-end systems, there’s increasing acknowledgment that open-source might has a role to play in end-user facing systems too. community driven open-source projects are being evaluated right along side best of breed solutions from vendors or ASP providers.

In fact, further than just being considered on par with packaged or commercial products, many, many people have indicated the message of “by Higher Education, for Higher Education” really resonates both within IT as well as with our end users. Ranging from solid support for integration with existing systems in uPortal, to teaching and learning as evidenced by the comment “It seems like EDUCAUSE is all Sakai” show a tremendous amount of attention and consideration being given for education build open-source solutions.