It is not envisaged that JISC will manage
the definitions of all the services in the
framework, but instead JISC will work with other organisations to create and maintain
these definitions. Many of the services identified in the work so far overlap with work by
the Open Knowledge Initiative at MIT, and the efforts of the IMS Global Learning
Consortium, Internet2 and other initiatives. Rather than go it alone, JISC needs to
develop the framework in partnership, and consider “exit strategies” for service
definitions, including handing over the work to national (e.g. BSI) or global (e.g. ISO, IMS)
standards and specifications consortia and organisations.
The toolkits that accompany the framework
will be managed through the open-source
community. Because these toolkits will be used as integral components within a wide
range of products, applications, and services, they are far more likely to gain the
neccessary support for their continued development from open-source developers than
previous educational open source efforts aimed at supplying whole applications such as
VLEs. It is also likely that some of these toolkits will be adopted as reference models
when accompanying definitions are handed off to BSI, ISO etc.
