Open Source Strategies for Educational Multimedia

ePresence is an educational multimedia system for producing interactive webcasts that are accessible in real-time by remote viewers and retrospectively by archive viewers who can browse and search for what they want to see. This paper briefly presents the system, motivates our decision to release it using a combined open source and "community source" model, and highlights major challenges that lie ahead. Four classes of challenge are identified: technology, community, legal framework, and business model. Responses to the challenges are described.