1973 the ambitious Cybersyn project aimed at developing a real time control system for the Chilean economy. Based on Stafford Beers cybernetic management theory an "Operations Room" was developed, bundling all collected information, which was transmitted at that time with the help of telex machines.
2016, 43 years later, our capacity to collect and process data has multiplied. Nevertheless it is still difficult to get an overview of the fast growing global OER community, causing redundant development of infrastructure and content as well as missed chances for cooperation, reuse and knowledge transfer.
The OER World Map project is providing a solution for this problem by providing an "Open Operation Room" for the OER community which can be used by everyone to get high quality information on current, past and future OER activities. By combining elements of both social network and management information systems it fosters cooperation and sharing within the OER community and supports effective use of resources allocated worldwide by governments, cooperations and the civil society.
While the dataset provided by the OER World Map supports all types of cooperative action within the OER community, we are currently focusing on following main user stories (Epics):
1. As an OER actor I would like to find other OER actors and connect with them, so that I can cooperate in a coordinated way and share resources and knowledge with them.
2. As a teacher or learner I would like to get qualified, complete and current lists of existing OER offers, so that I can easily find open resources, which fit to my current learning or teaching context.
3. As an OER policy maker I would like to get meaningful statistics and oversights on the status of the OER movement in order to take and defend decisions in favor of OER.
After an initial competitive prototyping (phase I) The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funded the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center (hbz) 2015 to develop a first version of the production system, which allowed to collect relevant data on organizations, persons, services, projects and events (phase II). The current phase III of the project will bring refined usability, new functionality and a significantly increased population of the map.
In early 2016 we provided a printed report called the "OER Atlas" for the German OERde Festival, which includes an estimated 80 percent of OER activities in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. By doing so, we provided a proof of concept, that it is possible to collect all OER related data for a complete country with reasonable effort.
The presentation will summarize the main results of phase III of the project and give an outlook on the development planned for 2017.
Beer, Stafford: "_Plattform for Change", Chichester 1975
Neumann, Jan: "_The German speaking OER landscape in numbers", online available under https://oerworldmap.wordpress.com/2016/03/18/the-german-speaking-oer-landscape-in-numbers/
Neumann, Jan: "_Printing the OER World Map: The OER Atlas", online available under https://oerworldmap.wordpress.com/2016/03/08/printing-the-oer-world-map-the-oer-atlas/
