We can point to so many different success stories in the open source world. I have a long list of favorites, but some of the top ones are:  Linux, Apache, Drupal, Moodle, Hadoop and R. I have personally benefited from all of this tremendously and at Wellesley we use Linux, Apache, Drupal and R. We also use Sakai, which is another open source software. I am taking a course titled “The Analytics Edge” from MIT and loving it. As a part of this, I am cracking away at R. It is such a brilliant system, which has matured so much in the past two years. I have been involved in data modeling in collaboration with my wife for quite some time and was looking at R to replace SAS for . The last time I seriously looked at it was 2 years ago, but ruled out on lot of counts. But, the progress in the past couple of years has been tremendous and along with R Studio, a GUI front end to it, it is awesome.

Along the similar lines, I wanted to talk about eduroam, another brilliant idea. It is one of those collaborations amongst higher ed that works great. As I have written several times before, collaboration in higher ed a lot of times is simply more talk than action. Here is one where it is a tangible collaboration that we can all point to and be proud of.

The concept here is simple. Say you are visiting another higher ed anywhere in the world. You want to get on the network. It has been next to impossible to do this. In many cases, first you need a local sponsor. Then you need to plan ahead, fill out forms online etc. etc. and generally you get some unwieldy username and a password and a lot of restrictions. Generally, this tends to be so complicated that many don’t do it. The person inviting you will log you as himself/herself  or ask that you use another computer, so on and so forth. Many of these workarounds end up compromising the goals of security that drives organizations to protect their network in the first place.

So, eduroam comes along and in essence, it says –   if a member of institution A travels to B and both A and B are members of eduroam, A can provide his/her login credentials to login to B’s wireless network (accesspoint name eduroam) and upon successful login, they will be provided network access. Simple, right? Since Wellesley and MIT are eduroam members, if I go to MIT, I look for a wireless access point called eduroam and connect. I will be asked to authenticate. I provide my Wellesley username with @wellesley.edu and my Wellesley domain password. MIT passes this info to Wellesley to confirm that everything is OK. Upon verification, I am in! Of course, the network access I have may be a visitor access or slightly better than a visitor access, but that is up to individual schools to determine, but the simplicity is brilliant!

If you are interested in learning more about this, you can do so here.

We became eduroam member sometime last year and I have heard from several faculty and staff  how useful this has been. Based on stats we have collected, in the last month, we have had several hundreds who used eduroam to connect. I am sure several of these are our own users, so we are sorting out the external users from ours.

I feel happy to be part of this great collaboration!