And now it’s time for my third and final assignment blog post for my course on open educational technologies.

“For this final assignment, select at least three motivational factors and three barriers for your own practice or setting from the provided bar graphs, and, if applicable, from Thankachan and Moore (2017). With this information, you will Identify an open educational technology for your setting or interest, possible barriers to uptake, and possible motivators for uptake. Feel free to include motivational factors and barriers from your own experience if they’re not included in the resources named here.”

I started this journey by thinking of motivational factors and came up with: provide something no other tool has, customizable, and freedom from vendor reliance. And then considered the barriers: lack of technical and institutional support, finding the right application, and resistance to change. But maybe, I thought, I should first consider what tool I would want to identify and investigate. Then I thought about Office365 and Teams, the corner they have on the institutional market, so to speak, the lack of access for many of the tools to students, and the privacy implications these large proprietary systems have for everyone at an institution.

I decided to go big and look for an open source something that would allow people to collaborate and communicate, include space for small group activities, file storage, and tools for creation of projects and presentations. And so I began with a simple Google search for open collaboration software. There were several listed, you know, in those “top 10 open collaboration tools” kind of lists, and as I checked those lists out, I found one that matched the criteria I was looking for: A product called OpenPaas.

I was told that “OpenPaas is a free and open source collaboration suite that helps teams to stay connected and work together with ease. It allows secure file sharing, video conferencing, scheduling and maintaining calendars, and many more facilities that enable faster, efficient, and smarter team collaboration. It is known as the best open source alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Suite. If you plan to create a smart digital work environment, deploying OpenPaas would be the right decision. As its on-premises license is free, you can host it on your server and have full control over your data’s security.” https://www.goodfirms.co/collaboration-software/blog/best-free-open-source-collaboration-softwarehttps://open-paas.org/

Hmmm, I thought. If OpenPaas does everything it says it does: email, file sharing, video conferencing, this could be a winner. Of course, I had lots of questions, for example, are the documents created in it’s office suite compatible with WORD and Google Docs, since people will likely be collaborating with others using those platforms. is the video conferencing platform usable on all devices and for people with lower Internet capabilities. How accessible are all the tools in the suite? And who else in the land of post-secondary is using it?

I wanted to know more, but was reticent to send my personal information to OpenPaas in order to receive it. My feeling is that all the information anyone would need should be openly available, and not dependent on filling in a form to request it. Also, where were the demos? Again, having spent one too many meetings with a vendor trying to hawk their wares, i do not want to be requesting open vendor demos for a product I am only interested in seeing more about not to recommend to my institution.

I began to search for more information on OpenPaas, but was stymied. It seemed to have been released maybe in 2011 or 2013, but its Facebook page’s last post was from 2019 and its last Twitter post from 2020. Alarm bells began to ring!

You see, this is one reason I am reticent to lead a charge institutionally to replace enterprise systems with open ones. You find one that looks great when you head to the website, but then it turns out to be defunct. Why is information still out there on this product? What happened to it? Did anyone invest into it only to discover it shut down one day? I spent a lot of time trying to find out, and finally clicked on the developer page.

I checked out the list on the developer page and while there was no information anywhere to assure me, I believe OpenPaas is now something called Twake, although Twake is billed as only an alternative to Microsoft Teams. Maybe now I can find out more. Yup – here are some actual reviews, but still, no demos, no list of who is actually using Twake, nothing to help me really understand what its capabilities are, or if large post-secondary institutions are taking the leap and investing in it.

My opinion is that if you really want to show off an open source product and get people engaged with it, you need to be better at actually, well showing it off. Regular folks at institutions or organizations want to see demos, want to read comments and testimonials from people using the tools, and want to be able to contact them to find out more. We do not want to go down rabbit holes trying desperately to find information that will be robust enough for us to make a case at our institutions to invest in a product. And while I am ranting, if you are truly being open, don’t use language and provide information that only caters to those already in the know – I don’t want all the technology decisions at my institutions being made by techies who may or may not know what the average person really needs. Plus, I support Ed tech and I need to be able to find basic information in order to make recommendations or to inform faculty I am working with.

In the end, after spending several hours searching and clicking and grimacing, I was hugely disappointed that information about something with such potential seemed completely inaccessible to me. I don’t think I actually followed the letter of the assignment law, but perhaps, revisiting motivational factors and barriers, all the motivation in the world will not overcome the barrier of not being able to find the information you need.

References

United Nations University (2011). Free and open source software in sub-Saharan Africa. https://unu.edu/publications/articles/free-and-open-source-software-in-sub-saharan-africa.html