For more than two decades, the Apereo Foundation has championed a simple but powerful idea: higher education thrives when it creates, adopts, and sustains open source software together. With a history dating back to 2004, Apereo has grown into a global, community-driven organization that supports a diverse ecosystem of open source projects (several 20+ years old) used by colleges and universities worldwide.
In this session, we’ll introduce The Apereo Foundation, its mission and history, outline the Foundation’s unique role in fostering open technology within higher education, and share how our community-led model helps academic institutions move from isolated innovation to sustainable collaboration. Attendees will learn how Apereo supports its projects—through governance, community development, incubation, events, research, and a variety of shared services—and how those projects power online learning, campus calendering, video management, data ecosystems, authentication/authorization, and more across the sector.
We’ll highlight key initiatives such as Apereo’s Micro-Conferences to build cross-disipline communities, our Incubation process that helps emerging projects on campus find success, and our evolving "Community as a Service" model that fosters "self-sustainability" through entrepreneurship and partnerships, where global partners (non-profit, academic, and corporate) work to strengthen the open source infrastructure that higher education depends on and benefits from.
This session is ideal for developers, educators, researchers, project maintainers, and open source advocates who want to understand how open source communities can flourish within academic environments. We'll not only share what Apereo is doing, but how, so others can learn from the 25 years of success the Foundation and our projects have achieved. Whether you are looking to join an existing project, incubate a new idea, contribute code, connect with peers, or explore partnerships, Apereo offers multiple pathways for engagement.
