This is the draft text of the main messages for this Section, developed from the comments made in the first round of consultation.

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It would be possible to create an "open source" research community, which spawns from the members' own ideas and projects, using social software and social networking tools. The inspiration comes from sourceforge.net where people post projects and others who are interested join the project. People from different backgrounds could share empirical data and analyse them from different perspectives, or work collaboratively on creating new systems.

A commitment to open research would operate on three levels:

• Open outcomes: all the fruits of research should be freely available to all citizens of the world.
• Open tools: any technology we use or develop to support our research, such as the platform we're using here, should be free and open source.
• Open process: we should find ways to expose our work and invite collaboration from its early stages, while acknowledging the need to maintain a clear structure of academic credit and critique.

More generally, the 'open education' movement is gathering pace. 

- quote from 'global e-learning blog': Educational content is still too expensive and inaccessible for many developing countries, whether it is digital or traditional. As connectivity rates increase dramatically, it makes sense to prepare digital materials for these newly connected educational institutes, teachers and young people. There are a number of interesting projects worldwide to do this, including the Global Text Book project, aiming to "create a free library of 1,000 electronic textbooks for students in the developing world". These textbooks will cover areas typically included in the first two years of undergraduate study - I'm sure many developed world students will use them too.

- we could also make reference to the UK Open University's recent OpenLearn launch, in addition to the others round the world already under way.

The experience of Kaleidoscope shows that online collaborative technologies allow us to

• develop a shared research laboratory for this field,
  
• support scholars in collaborating on a virtual doctoral school for European post-graduates,
  
• provide an open archive of research documents. It has also shown us that these processes need to be moderated, and subject to agreed policies, if they are to work really effectively.

The products of TEL research then need a robust process to ensure they are adopted. Commercial products have the route to market that research products do not have. The research community therefore needs to explore ways of collaborating with the digital industries to embed research in commercial products, and to bring commercial funding into research development. The experience of Kaleidoscope shows that commercial developers can be engaged with the research community when there is a flourishing user group model.