Hi Leigh, Solid well founded advice as always. Quality is equally important for both open and closed models of production. However, its typically a harder sell when using peer-production models. We've started some work on the Learning Design processes and QA procedures in WikiEducator and it seems to me that we should encourage international participation in refining these processes.
You're absolutely right - academics find the work-in-progress a difficult concept yet its OK to have a work in progress model behind closed doors! Looks like an education task for us.
A very good point about guarantees of service. COL, of course, does everything it reasonably can to ensure this quality of service. That said, hardware does fail and the network can go down.
I've worked for Universities where the LMS was regularly out of service or shut down for regular maintenance - and folk used to accept this. However, when it's an external free service - the expectations on service delivery seem to be far higher - go figure!
As you've pointed out - WikiEducator's downtime has been far lower than industry standards for a comparable service of its size. I don't have the figures with me - but in the last 18 months we've had about 8 - 10 hours total downtime including software upgrades. We run a LAMP configuration and these machines just chug away . Two of these downtime instances were out of our control. In one case hardware failure and another where problem with the German ISP network. Most CIO's dream of this level of uptime! That said - it doesn't remove the perception of the perceived risk of external free services.
mmmm this has got me thinking - I wonder whether a model of shared financial responsibility for infrastructure services might be the way to go?
This way local institutions can then take shared responsibility and ownership of the services they support on campus - almost a Web 2.0 model of financing ICT services.
COL is like any business we do a proper cost-benefit and corresponding risk analysis in the way we configure our WikiEducator service. Its conceivable to provide guarantees for 24/7 support with synchronized mirrors all over the world - but current traffic levels wouldn't warrant the cost. Consequently shared decisionmaking over technical infrastructure ”when folk are contributing real dollars to ensure their wish-list “ may be the way to go here.
Great reflections and appreciate the candid reflections.
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