Open Knowledge Initiative

Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.) develops specifications that describe how components of an educational software environment communicate with each other and with other enterprise systems. The O.K.I. team has created a set of open service interface definitions (OSIDs) for use by educational institutions and commercial vendors to create learning management systems and tools that interoperate.

Client Need

As O.K.I. prepared version 2.0 of the service definitions, they wanted to refresh the look of the web site and make sure they were poised to communicate easily and openly with the open source community. The community was making development decisions based on O.K.I.’s progress and needed timely information. The team contacted AMPS to redesign the site.

Strategy

In gathering requirements, AMPS uncovered O.K.I.’s need for a self-publishing process. Team members and support staff needed an easy way to add, review, and publish information on demand. AMPS analyzed the existing web site and identified categories of content that the team provides to the community. AMPS then designed a forms-based tool for posting new text while enabling dynamic linking within the site from each entry.

Results

Today, O.K.I. team members publish new information — partner and project info, OSID descriptions, news, and documentation — as it becomes available, and community interaction has spontaneously increased. Team members easily and efficiently make updates without specialized web publishing knowledge. "We would like to thank the talented web design and development team at MIT's Academic Media Production Services for their tremendous effort," said Jeff Merriman, Senior Strategist for Academic Computing. "Their expertise in designing and delivering this new system for O.K.I. has been a boon to the project."