After the positive reviews and the expansion of our partnership network in 2016 (under programs for entrepreneurial support, led by the Ministry of Economy and the Open Society Institute, as well as through the Sofia Business School global masterclasses), 2017 proved to be an extremely successful year for the Open Source University project, which was kicked-off back in 2015 by CSSB team members and which to a big extend become the basis for the formation of the Center itself.
From academic perspective, the project was peer-reviewed by some of the leading technology institutes within the European scientific community and was featured in academic journals across Bulgaria, Latvia, and the Czech Republic. OS.UNIVERSITY was among those open innovation solutions to address the challenges of Industry Revolution 4.0., discussed during the annual conference of the global Society of Open Innovation, based in South Korea, which publishes the open access “Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity”.
The same for the “Perspectives on Entrepreneurship Development in the Digital Age” conference, attended by leading university and industrial representatives from the CEE region, at Brno University of Technology where Prof. Ognyan Andreev and Hristian Daskalov presented their work on the subject of managing stakeholders’ engagement in open source and social innovation projects, providing the Open Source University as a one-of-its-kind use case.
The project was featured in Riga, Latvia once more, during the 58th international scientific conference of Riga Technical University (RTU) where the topic of discussion was the involvement of Academia in social innovation for sustainable development with the OS.UNIVERSITY as a best practice, based on human-centered design.
OS.UNIVERSITY, intended to introduce world’s first distributed distributed academic & career development ledger on the Ethereum blockchain, received a warm welcome during the annual conference of the Monetary Research Center (MRC) in Sofia in October, having been presented in a panel discussion with senior governmental officials, European academicians and investment professionals. Presentation is available on SlideShare at “Application of cryptocurrency innovation beyond the financial world“.
Last but not least, the Open Source University team had the honor to speak at the first of its kind pan-Slavic conference in the field of humanities at Sofia University – Slav Conf, and provided insights on how technology innovation in the field of distributed computing can actually create new opportunities for non-technical fields of science, humanities and arts. Presentation is available at “Technology Innovation Loves Humanities: Open Education on the Blockchain“.
Apart from those research highlights, the renowned experts, constituting OS.UNIVERSITY advisory team, had the opportunity to promote a solution that has the potential to revolutionize the way 7 billion people develop academically and grow professionally on high-profile international forums, such as Autonomy 2017 in Paris and the “The Next Big Thing” conference in Sofia. Additional opportunities unveiled throughout November & December. Among them was the “Open Alt” conference in the Czech Republic — a perfect opportunity for open source enthusiasts to get to know the Open Source University and get on board of the project.
Center for Shared Science & Business 