At last, the Consortium Agreements (CA) were shipped and are coming back signed. The requirements to run this project using a CA model led us into significant additional overhead that we have not applied in the past. Even though I worked from template designs there was still enough ‘wiggle-room’ that required the legal experts to refine the issues as each institution seems to have its own received interpretation. I hear that delays due to this are so common that many projects actually sign off the agreement towards the end. My conclusions: A CA model does not necessarily fit and should not be mandatory - however, if it is, then do not start with previous examples and a template to try to save the chain any work - just find a contracts expert and explain what you wish to achieve and the constraints from above, even if it costs.

Last week we had an Elluminate session to look at JorumOpen and metadata issues. After some technical difficulties I managed to join in and discover lots of support for OER in the Jorum Community pages. This looks very useful but the fragmentation problem arises again - there are so many places to hold the OER conversations. Our Centre projects will be testing the processes hopefully in mid October. The Elluminate problem that remains is that it takes so long to pick the bones out of the dialogue when the recording is released. Jump into 1/3 and scan the slides. Blogged notes would be best from each participant.

Finally, the project web pages and blogs are starting to appear. These are internally listed in our sharepoint but once we get a few more I will add these to the project page.