With my plane now somewhere over Eastern Ontario, I’ve little time to write about last week’s amazing meetings in Cape Town. Let me just report this: 30 amazing brains from universities, government ministries and foundations gathered to come up with a statement to rally and accelerate the open education movement. Drawing on a tremendous amount of laughter, kindness and wisdom, we came up with the raw material for a declaration that we hope many hundreds (thousands?) of other people and organizations will sign. I will be crafting this with the help of people from the New South Wales Dept of Education, Creative Commons, Macquarie University and Utah’s Centre for Open and Sustainable Learning over the coming weeks.

The idea of a ‘declaration’ stems from the experience of the Budapest Initiative, which used a similar document to build huge momentum for the open access movement. The Budapest document was a mix of vision, values, definitions and strategies supported by the people who drafted and signed it. We’re looking at a similar mix of ideas in the Cape Town Declaration, which I have summarized in this doodle:

Beyond just getting such a diverse and amazing group on the same page, one of the big achievements was expanding the conversation to include not only open educational resources, but also teacher engagement and empowerment and the development of policies make open sourcing education easier. These three ideas will be at the core of the strategy section of the declaration. I think I can see Lake Simcoe out the window. More on this as the story evolves.