In the past few months I've attended the most recent Sakai and Kuali community events. Aside from adding to my collection of great polo shirts I'm also reminded how important these face to face gatherings are. While these communities are very productive working as a globally distributed team, there's no substitute for the connections made face to face.

Attendees at these community events often remark that they need a forum to engage campus leaders who don't typically attend the community events.

I'm really pleased to see and support a new event with this in mind. Mark your calendars for The OPEN Forum. It takes place December 7-9 in Palm Springs, CA.

From the event website: 

The OPEN Forum provides an opportunity for leaders and decision makers from colleges and universities to come together to enhance their understanding and vision for openness across higher education.

The vision for The OPEN Forum is lofty. We seek to increase the strategic benefit of technology in higher education. We believe that this can be done by bringing together a diverse group of great minds and investing time to understand and to evaluate the intricacies of this new open environment.

To this end, the forum will be centered on A DIALOGUE, fed by insightful keynotes and facilitated to allow for talking, listening, debating, sharing, building, debunking and learning. We believe that the dialogue must ADDRESS THE OPPORTUNITIES AND COMPLEXITIES of openness that often require a fundamentally different approach to defining and evaluating options with a broader scope of impact.

The participants include HIGHER EDUCATION EXECUTIVES who have the ability to affect change, as well as the insight of corporate colleagues who have grappled with similar issues.