The Cape Town Declaration arises from a small but lively meeting of open education activists in Cape Town during September 2007. The meeting was convened by the Open Society Institute (now Open Society Foundations [OSF]) and the Shuttleworth Foundation.
Purpose
Entitled Open Sourcing Education, the original aim of this meeting was to accelerate the international effort to promote open resources, technology and teaching practices in education. The participants represented many points of view, many disciplines and many nations. All are involved in ongoing open education initiatives.
Outcomes
In Cape Town, meeting participants explored how their separate initiatives could work together to achieve much broader, deeper impact. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, authored jointly by all those who attended the meeting, was the first concrete outcome from these discussions. A number of additional collaborations on open education projects have also emerged.
Attendees
Meeting participants and co-authors of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration included:
- Richard Baraniuk, Connexions / Rice University (United States)
- Karien Bezuidenhout, Shuttleworth Foundation (South Africa)
- Ahrash Bissell, Creative Commons / CCLearn (United States)
- Rhett Bowlin, Open Society Institute (Hungary)
- Darius Cuplinskas, Open Society Institute (United Kingdom)
- James Dalziel, LAMS Foundation (Australia)
- Heather Ford, iCommons (South Africa)
- Melissa Hagemann, Open Society Institute (United States)
- Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, University of Cape Town (South Africa)
- Jason Hudson, Shuttleworth Foundation (South Africa)
- Helen King, Shuttleworth Foundation (South Africa)
- John Lesperance, Ministry of Education (Seychelles)
- Peter Levy, Curriki (United States)
- Jaroslaw Lipszyc, Fundacja Nowoczesna Polska (Poland)
- Andrew Rens, Shuttleworth Foundation (South Africa)
- David Rosenfeld, Student PIRGs (United States)
- Jan Philipp Schmidt, University of the Western Cape/United Nations University MERIT (South Africa)
- Mark Surman, Shuttleworth Foundation (Canada)
- Aleesha Taylor, Open Society Institute (United Kingdom)
- Paul West, Commonwealth of Learning (Canada)
- Werner Westermann, Educalibre (Chile)
- Mark Horner (South Africa)
- Lisa Petrides, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (United States)
- Grace Baguma, Department of Education Uganda (Uganda)
- Delia Browne, Ministerial Council on Employment, Education and Training and Youth Affairs (Australia)
- Eve Gray, Centre for Educational Technology, UCT (South Africa)
- Jimmy Wales, Wikimedia Foundation/Wikia (United States)
- David Wiley, Brigham Young University (USA)