Trying to Go Open

Theoretically, open source solutions are a good match with the resource scarce organization such as a young academic journal to make the publication process and the knowledge shared explicit to the participants in the system. This paper uses a case study approach to investigate how the decision to have such a system depends on a myriad of factors, and tracks how the editorial team decided to adopt an open source journal management system for their knowledge management issues. The study argues that these components should not be taken in isolation by showing how the previous decisions can become a hindrance as these components change over time. The results show that some factors, though initially thought to be unimportant, can become major forces as the journal matures, and a more holistic approach could help to side-step the problems faced.

Technological Ecosystem Maps for IT Governance

Technological ecosystems are a widespread solution to address the challenges of the information technologies in organizations. It is important to have tools to correctly and quickly evaluate them. The Technological Ecosystem Map (TEmap) is a tool to intuitively interpret complex information maintaining both a global and a detailed vision of the technologies. It is a polygonal and structured representation of the main elements of the ecosystem. Each element is evaluated according to its maturity level, indicating how it contributes to fulfil the organization objectives. Each maturity level is represented by a colour, so that the TEmap takes the form of a heat map. The particular case of the University of Alicante is chosen to illustrate its construction. The TEmap is a simple but powerful way to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a technological ecosystem and the possible actions to improve the solution to the strategic questions of the organization.

Tools Interoperability for Learning Management Systems

E-learning has experienced an extraordinary growth over the last years. We have reached a point in time when most learning institutions have adopted an LMS as an integral element of their teaching and learning infrastructure. In parallel, the number of educational tools available for learning is increasing and keeps evolving. This variety means that it is not always easy or possible to add these educational tools into LMSs to enhance the learning process. It would, however, be in everyone´s interest for these tools to interact with the LMSs. To solve the problem of interoperability between LMS and learning tools, several interoperability standards define ways so that LMSs can interface with external learning tools in order to make them accessible from within the learning platform in an intuitive and concise way. This chapter is focused on the service-oriented approach to interoperability and specifically on the IMS LTI standard and the TSUGI hosting environment that aims to simplify the integration of external learning tools.

Long-Term Analysis of the Development of the Open ACS Community Framework

The OpenACS community framework is a mature software toolkit for developing online community platforms. Originally invented at a university, it has prospered due to a high commercial demand and major investments, and subsequently settled as an open source project. In this chapter, the authors extend a previous analysis of the evolution of this software framework and its surrounding community. This long-term analysis of fourteen years of the project's evolution considers the commercial background of the members of the developer community (for-profit or non-profit), investigates the changing contribution and collaboration structures and the geographical distribution of the user community. The results reveal a continuous shift from new product development work by commercial developers to maintenance work by the open community and a relatively uniform and growing global distribution of users over the years.

Software Engineering for Technological Ecosystems

Software engineering for technological ecosystems also referred as Software Ecosystems (SECOs) focuses on the concept of software engineering field. The study of SECOs started in early 90s under business schools, mainly focused on software engineering based on the software product lines approach that aimed to allow external designers and developers to contribute to hitherto closed platforms. The chapter gives background, various dimensions, framework, architectural challenges of SECOs, and explains various limitations and different recommendations and solutions to provide a better and conclusive platform for the technology ecosystems.

Need of the Research Community

Universities are playing main role in research and socio-economic development of the country. The University research generates lot of research information and it is physically added in to libraries. The Research information should be easily available to new Researchers. Every research is generating new knowledge, and it's just kept in the form of thesis, dissertations, research papers, articles, etc. The enormous amount of research data exists in different geographical locations, which could not be investigated by researchers because research data is not available in a central location. The research community is facing lot of problems in sharing, searching and collecting required information and knowledge for their research. Due to these issues, researchers may do work of ‘reinventing a wheel'. This chapter puts a conceptual study for open source community to develop a Knowledge Management System for researchers. This study specifically focuses on Knowledge management approach and proposes the OS_KMS model for research community as an open source software.

Enhancing Education for the Knowledge Society Era with Learning Ecosystems

In order to achieve a true transition from the Information Society to the Knowledge Society, Information and Communication Technologies must play a capital role in educational and knowledge management processes. The gap between advances in technology and current teaching methods is slowing up the integration of new educational technologies into already existing technological and methodological frameworks. As a result, the combination of mature educational technologies and educational methods does not meet the demands of today's society. In the pursuit of ways to reconcile consolidated and emerging technologies with educational methods to improve educational processes, the authors propose a technological environment to support learning services: the learning ecosystem. This chapter presents an initial proposal of a learning technological ecosystem based on an architecture framework and interoperable components, and outlines the required elements, actions and methods for learning ecosystems to become a reality.

Knowledge Structuring for Sustainable Development and the Hozo Tool

The search for more actionable knowledge lies at the core of Sustainability Science and its implicit desire to improve the lives of various stakeholders without disrupting the balance of Nature and efficient use of all available resources. In this chapter, the authors have examined current shortfalls in knowledge-centric research and proposed the creation of an Ontology-based open-source tool to create a more practical approach for researchers to facilitate both thought and decision-making process in order to solve pressing issues with place-based actions. The effectiveness of the Hozo Tool is then examined and validated using four case studies in an attempt to both refine the current models and propose the necessary steps to create a more holistic knowledge ecosystem – one that might ultimately facilitate broader collaboration worldwide.

Gamification Ecosystems

Gamification is hot topic today. Many organizations consider the application of gamification in their processes. Therefore, to implement gamification, it's necessary to know all elements and their relationships that comprise gamification ecosystem. The aim of this chapter is to clarify all details related to that ecosystem. At the beginning we defined gamification and similar concepts. Next, we introduced different types of gamification. One of the key parts of the chapter describes various game elements taxonomies and most used game elements or building blocks of gamification. Player as an inseparable part of that ecosystem is described through player identification, player types and player life cycle. It's clear now that there is lot of different approaches available for application of games in non-leisure context. Rather than to talk about one kind of game or game system, we decided to use term ecosystem in order to be clearer and more consistent with our approach. That is to integrate different approaches and orchestrate different tools in order to make them work together.