The Tetra Collaboration

The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Hull, and the UHI Millennium Institute announce the formation of the Tetra Collaboration, (1) the outcome of a series of meetings and a major summit held at the University of Oxford on the 25th-26th September 2006.

The goal of the Tetra Collaboration is to coordinate activities across the member organisations so as to more efficiently develop and deploy open source enterprise applications of use to UK and European universities and colleges. By working together we can share common solutions to better serve the needs of students and academics, and each of the institutions named is committed to making tangible contributions into the collaboration (2).

The Tetra Collaboration will work together on projects that address the needs of education, research, technical infrastructure, service oriented architectures (SOA), federated systems, and application frameworks.

Tetra will demonstrate the potential of the JISC's e-Framework, will be built on open standards and IMS specifications, and is committed to developing sustainable community source solutions for education (3).

One of the first Tetra projects will be to continue the work of the Bodington (4) open source learning management system to produce Bodington - Next Generation or Bodington NG. This will combine elements of the Sakai open source framework with the pedagogically strong Bodington toolset. A major design goal of Bodington NG is to develop and implement an SOA enterprise e-framework.

It will provide a smooth transition for existing Bodington users to the Bodington NG platform, preserving and extending the trusted enterprise functionality used daily by these institutions. The Tetra Collaboration is open to working with other institutions who wish to join this exciting effort.

Tetra will both maintain and evolve the Bodington user interface as well as making the Bodington toolset available to Sakai users. The joint effort between Sakai and Tetra will then begin collaboratively to merge the Bodington toolset with the Sakai framework, as well as extend the latter to accommodate the full range of Tetra's pedagogical and institutional requirements.