.LRN Mission

The .LRN Consortium is a tax-exempt, not-for-profit corporation for advancing the adoption, improvement, and development of .LRN. Our mission is to convene a global community of innovative people and organizations in educational technology to share knowledge and applications using open source principles.

Our goal is to:

• provide the premier toolkit for innovation in educational technology and research collaboration
• support education and research communities with advanced collaboration tools
• provide a scalable, enterprise architecture based on open industry standards
• create a sustainable platform adaptable to local languages and cultures

Governance

The .LRN Consortium is governed by member institutions and supported by public and private sponsors. In consultation with Consortium members, the Board of Directors sets strategic direction and provides financial and operaitonal oversight. In its operations, the Consortium:

• coordinates software development
• ensures a reliable release process
• supports quality assurance and certification
• provides framework for legal due diligence
• acts as a clearing house for communication
• shares best practices with the community
• undertakes marketing and promotion

Consortium Members

Organizations

• Alliances for Quality Education (US)
• Boston Museum of Science (US)
• Galileo University (Guatemala)
• Harvard Kennedy School of Government: E-Government Executive Education (US)
• Heidelberg University Medical School & University Hospital of Heidelberg (Germany)
• Massachusetts General Hospital (US)
• MIT Sloan School of Management (US)
• Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Spain)
• Universität Heidelberg (Germany)
• Universität Mannheim (Germany)
• Universitat de Valencia (Spain)
• Universitetet I Bergen (Norway)
• University of Sydney Web Engineering Group (Australia)
• Young Americas Business Trust (International)
• Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (Austria)

Companies

• Semantic Internet Innovation (Italy)
• Furfly (US)
• Solution Grove (US)
• OtterGroup (US)
• ESM Partners (US)
• Viaro.Net (Guatemala)
• Cognovis (Germany)

Membership

The principal benefit of consortium membership is active participation in a worldwide community dedicated to developing innovative educational software. Member institutions collectively set priorities but also provide cash or in-kind contributions, based on their own choosing, towards consortium operations and goals.

Any organization, regardless of its size or capability, may join the consortium for a very modest fee.

Please visit our membership page to find out more.

.LRN Strategic Goals

Our three year strategic goals are:

• 75 institutions each running .LRN in production for at least 1k users each
• Another 100 institutions each running .LRN in production for 50-1000 users
• Significant portion of these from developing world (will help discipline TCO)
• Grow active developer base by 2x
• Grow number of .LRN-certified packages by 3x
• See at least 3-5 significant .LRN-based innovations in educational technology emerge each year
• 95% of .LRN users in each institution report “satisfied”
• 80% of .LRN users in each institution report “very satisfied”
• 1-2 major corporate Consortium members, each with $10M .LRN-based business
• Faculty, non-technical evangelist at every user organization
• Enough Consortium membership to support at least $200k annual budget, with 40-50% of this available as a development matching fund

Member	Institution
.LRN Board of Directors
Alfred Essa, Founder Alfred Essa is Chief Information Officer (CIO) at MIT's Sloan School of Management. As CIO, he is responsible for providing leadership and strategy for MIT Sloan's information technology operations, services, and initiatives. Al is also the Principal Investigator of iLearn, a research effort to explore next generation frameworks for e-Learning. iLearn is funded by iCampus, an MIT-Microsoft Research Alliance. At MIT, he also participates as a member of several working groups on technology architecture, including the Information Technology Architecture Group (iTAG) and the Education Technology Architecture Group (eTAG). Al is a graduate of Haverford College and Yale University. He also served as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in 1982.	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Carl Robert Blesius, Chairman Carl Blesius is a National Library of Medicine fellow through the Harvard/MIT Health Sciences & Technology program working in the Laboratory of Computer Science at Massachusetts General Hospital. His main interests lie in projects related to the web, teaching, learning, and health. For more than five years, Carl worked for Heidelberg Medical School in Germany where initiated and helped implement an online learning environment for the University. His involvement with .LRN began with the internationalization of the software so it could replace the commercial system they had implemented two years before. Carl is a graduate of Heidelberg Medical School.	Massachusetts General Hospital
Rafael Calvo Rafael Calvo is Lecturer, Director of the Web Engineering Group and Associate Dean of ICT at the University of Sydney's School of Electrical and Information Engineering. He has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence applied to automatic document classification (e.g. website classification). He has taught at several universities, high schools and professional training institutions. He has worked at Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina), and as an Internet consultant for projects in Australia, Brazil, USA, and Argentina. Rafael is author of a book and over 50 other publications in the field. Rafael is also on the board of the Elearning Network of Australasia as well as the .LRN Consortium.	University of Sydney
Michael Hebgen Michael Hebgen is Deputy Director at Heidelberg's University Computing Center and heads the joined Elearning-Team of Medical Faculty and Computing Center. He works with many federal German science associations as a member or advisor like the DFG (German Research Community), the National Science Foundation, the Leibniz Association or the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Michael was very active in supporting the developing Medical Faculties in South East Europe, especially in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he was appointed in 2001 as Professor for Medical Informatics and full member of the Medical Faculty. Michael holds a Diploma in Mathematics from Heidelberg University.	Universität Heidelberg
Carlos Delgado Kloos, Vice-Chairman Carlos Delgado Kloos is Full Professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid and the Director of the Department of Telematics Enginering and of the Master of Electronic Commerce at this University. He is also the Director of the Nokia Chair. He has been and is presently involved in many research projects with intercontinental, European, national and bilateral funding. He is presently the coordinator of the E-LANE project, a European funded project that intends to set up e-learning demonstration initiatives in Latin America. He has published over 120 articles in national and international conferences and journals. He has written a book and co-edited five. Carlos is Dr. Ing. Telecomunicación from the Technical University of Madrid and Dr. rer. nat. (in Computer Science) from the Technical University of Munich.	Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Cesar Brea Cesar Brea is founder and managing partner of ESM Partners, and has more than 15 years experience leading sales, business development and marketing in the high technology sector. Cesar has held executive management positions at technology companies including Contact Network Corporation, Razorfish, and ArsDigita Corporation, where the original software platform for the .LRN open source application suite was developed. Earlier, Cesar was a manager at Bain & Company, where he focused on high-technology businesses, and a principal with Symmetrix, a re-engineering consulting and software development firm. Cesar holds an MBA from Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School, and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College.	ESM Partners
.LRN Technical Advisory Committee
Don Baccus	Independent
Dirk Gomez Dirk Gomez has been working with ACS and OpenACS since 2000. During his time at ArsDigita he worked more than two years on the Siemens ShareNet project. He currently works as a programmer and administrator on the intranet project of one of the world's largest logistics companies.	Independent
Dave Bauer Dave Bauer has been working with OpenACS since 2000 and is currently an elected member of the OpenACS Core Team. He is an expert on the OpenACS Content Repository and has worked on packages for OpenACS such as Survey, Edit This Page and XCMS content management applications, and the File Storage file sharing application.	Independent
Andrew Grumet Andrew Grumet has been building sites on OpenACS and its predecessor ACS since 1999, including sites for the World Bank Group, Hewlett-Packard Corp. and MIT Sloan School of Management. In Spring 2002 he worked with Sloan to complete .LRN 1.0 and upgrade to it from a legacy system. Since then he's continued to work closely with Sloan, enhancing their .LRN deployment, rolling Sloan-specific enhancements back into the core framewok, and upgrading the Sloan system to new versions of .LRN as they are released.	MIT
Jeff Davis	Independent
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