Speaker

Boone Gorges

Abstract

Boone Gorges discuss the work he has done with the City University of New York (CUNY) to build an open source infrastructure on top of WordPress, more specifically the CUNY Academic Commons (https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/). The discussions focuses on the importance of open infrastructure for the public discourse and frames some creative approaches for universities to both fund and patronize open source projects instead of handing over all their resources to software vendors.

It also talks about the rise of the mobile internet and how that created an increased amount of complexity and pressure for open source initiatives to compete with the applification of everything that is controlled by just a few major tech players. What’s more, the birth of the important, yet obscure Reclaim Movement in edtech is discussed which would eventually be where Reclaim Hosting took its name. But for no other reason, spend some time listening to Boone discuss a moment of educational technology that increasingly is seemingly long, long ago on a web far, far away.

Recording