Next Friday 11/20
Mukkai Krishnamoorthy
Title: On the Value of Open-Source, Scholarly Information Technology Designed by and for Scholars
Speaker: Dr. Christopher J. Mackie, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Date: Friday, November 20, 2009
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies - Bruggeman Conference Center
Abstract: Higher education institutions routinely deliver technology services to their faculty that are designed, built, owned, and governed by others, whether enterprise IT professionals, academic technologists, computational scientists, or outside vendors. Would scholars work differently, and perhaps better, if scholarly technology services were designed—and owned, and governed—collaboratively, across institutions, by and for those they were intended to serve? What institutional and scholarly resources and commitments would such projects entail? Over the past decade, the Program in Research in Information Technology (RIT) of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has conducted an intensive philanthropic effort to explore these and other, related questions, resulting in more than 50 funded open source software projects which have grown to an aggregate capitalization of approximately $250m, achieving a current user-base of thousands of higher education institutions and tens of millions of faculty, staff, and students worldwide, supported by more than a dozen commercial vendors ranging from IBM to small, higher-education-specific firms. Mackie will provide an overview of RIT’s activities and methodologies and review selected, currently funded projects, focusing particularly on projects directly supporting the delivery of shared technology services in support of research, teaching, and learning. His analysis will focus on two issues: the strategic importance of institutionally sustained, shared technology services in an era of scientific “cyberinfrastructure” projects; and the implications of open source models for ensuring and sustaining faculty ownership and governance of their supporting technologies.
Christopher J. Mackie is Associate Program Officer in Research in Information Technology at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He holds Ph.D. and Masters degrees from Princeton University, a Masters degree from the University of Michigan, and an A.B. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A computational modeler by training, he has also published in the fields of regulatory theory, social research methods, and energy, education, and health policy. His most recent academic work involved the application of advances in social and affective neuroscience and psycholinguistics in order to model the emergence of human identity; in the furtherance of that project, he spent several years teaching computers how to feel. Earlier, Mackie held management positions in corporate healthcare as well as non-profit information technology, and served as an I.T. consultant to domestic and international NGOs.
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Best Regards
--Moorthy
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M. S. Krishnamoorthy (mskmo...@gmail.com)
518-276-6911(o) 518-273-6624(h) http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~moorthy