December 12, 2006
Troy, N.Y. — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was recently awarded a $50,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration (MATC) to support the continued development of Bedework, an open source, enterprise calendar system for higher education created at the Institute. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the MATC honors universities and other not-for-profit organizations who demonstrate leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with particular application to higher education and not-for-profit activities. The award was presented by World Wide Web inventor Sir Timothy Berners-Lee during the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 4, 2006.
Designed as a comprehensive calendaring and events system, Bedework – named in honor of the Venerable Bede, a renowned monk and scholar well known for his contributions to the understanding of calendaring – supports both events publishing and personal calendaring. The program is implemented in Java, a cross-platform programming language, and is intended to be platform independent, database independent, and standards compliant.
Originally developed by Michael Douglass, senior systems programmer in Rensselaer’s Communications & Middleware Technologies (C&MT) department, and Arlen Johnson, C&MT Web producer, Bedework is the successor of an earlier calendar program created in collaboration with the University of Washington. The open source project now has contributors in North America and Europe.
Bedework was initially developed to benefit the Rensselaer community, while simultaneously making the program user-friendly for other universities in hopes that they would adopt the software and contribute to its development, according to Gary Schwartz, director of Rensselaer’s department of C&MT.
“Many universities have developed institutional calendars, but almost all of them were only in use at their own institutions. Our hope is that Bedework will eventually attract a substantial user and developer community within higher education,” said Schwartz. “Today we have about a dozen institutions running Bedework, and a similar number are considering or deploying the program, so our goal is quickly becoming a reality.”
“It is very gratifying to have this work recognized by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,” said Rensselaer Chief Information Officer John Kolb. “We look forward to the opportunity to maximize the potential of the Bedework program through the development of additional, standards-compliant calendar features.”
The MATC awards are a project of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Program in Research in Information Technology (RIT). Rensselaer was one of 10 recipients selected from over 200 nominees by the MATC Award Committee.
Additional Bedework information can be found on the project’s Web site at: http://www.bedework.org.
About the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation program in
Research in Information Technology (RIT)
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation program in Research
in Information Technology (RIT) is dedicated to supporting the
thoughtful application of information technology to a wide
range of scholarly purposes. Based in New York, N.Y., the
Foundation is interested in promoting the study of uses of
digital technologies that can be applied to research and online
and distance learning and teaching. The Foundation also
supports investigations of new technical approaches to the
archiving of textual and multimedia materials that require
improved search and storage techniques and improvements in
user-interfaces. The impact of information technology (and
especially digitization) on scholarship, scholarly
communication, and libraries is indisputable.
Contact: Amber Cleveland
Phone: (518) 276-2146
E-mail: clevea@rpi.edu