Grant: College and Community Innovation Program

Seneca believes that the CCIP (College and Community Innovation Program) has the potential to help us scale and grow the research capacity of Seneca's Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT) in order to meet the ever-increasing needs of our current and prospective partners. Over the past decade, Seneca has established deep roots working with some of the largest open source companies on software that matters to hundreds of millions of users around the world. Through partnerships with large open source companies, and in particular their Toronto offices, we have established a model for real world involvement of faculty, staff, and students in large scale development projects. These large partners and potential partners are interested in having us work with them to develop highly trained individuals for employment, to collaboratively leverage open source technology, and to engage then in the network of open source collaboration that benefits the industry as a whole.What we have begun in the context of the classroom and through smaller research grants is ready to expand. Instead of turning away local small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) for lack of time and resources, we would like to be able to share with them the best open source practices and processes, as well as the connections we have made doing open source research and development. Local SMEs will significantly benefit from what we know about how to work with open source: from leveraging existing open technology in new products, to reductions in licensing costs, to increased global collaboration.