This is a brief ReadMe to accompany the Guide to Going Open.
Hello! My name is Sandra Kuipers, I'm the Maintainer of Gibbon, a MALAT student at Royal Roads University, and most recently the Learning Systems Specialist at International College Hong Kong. I am passionate about the power of open source in education. I believe that schools working together can create affordable and effective tools, built collaboratively on the values that matter most to them. You can read more about my perspective on my website or in an opensource.com article I wrote on the topic.
When I meet people and describe what Gibbon is—and that it's open source—I invariably get the question "what exactly does that mean?" This guide is for you. It's for anyone genuinely curious about the answer to this question. Many educators may have a vague understanding of open source, but when it comes down to making a decision for their school that hinges on an open source platform, they remain uncertain. Hopefully, the topics and information in this guide can help shed light open source for you.
This guide was also created as part of my Master's program, which is why you'll see references and the odd citation in the document. However, my aim is that this document is not just a one-off assignment, but will continue to be used as a living document by Gibbon and the wider open source community.
Ideally, this guide will help with whatever stage of technology adoption you're at: in the discovery stage, the planning stage, the implementation stage or it's resulting need for support. If you're planning a project to introduce an open source platform, this guide contains links and templates that may be of use to you. The intended outcome is that you can read, skim, and search the document for any insights that will help you make and informed decision, and help make your software launch go smoother.
Comments and discussion are welcome! This document has a discussion section at the top which you're welcome to use to leave thoughts or feedback. You can also comment directly on the guide and with any luck I'll get a notification and follow up with you. Again, the goal is to create a living document for the community, so feel free to contribute your thoughts and experiences. With that said, this document is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 so if any part of it is useful to you, feel free to reuse, revise, retain, remix, and redistribute.
Attribution
Created by Sandra Kuipers, July 2020, for the open source community.
This ReadMe is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International License CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Unless otherwise noted, all content may be used and shared under the terms of this license.
