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 will depend on collaboration between many different individuals and organizations: resource providers, resource aggregators, technology and learning researchers, and technology providers, etc. Representatives of many of these activities already exist in the OER community catalyzed by the Hewlett OER initiative. Furthermore Hewlett already understands some of the waters through which it must navigate toward an open participatory learning infrastructure.

Accustomed as we are to the information revolution, the accelerating pace of the 24/7 lifestyle, and the multi-connectivity provided by the World Wide Web, we rarely step back and ask what changes have been occurring in the background, at a slower pace. For the development of cyberinfrastructure (or a particular flavor of cyberinfrastructure that we are calling the OPLI), the long now is about 200 years. This is when two suites of changes began to occur in the organization of knowledge and the academy that have accompanied—slowly—the rise of an information infrastructure to support them: an exponential increase in information gathering activities by the state (statistics) and knowledge workers (the encyclopedists), and the accompanying development practices to sort, sift, and store information.

This long-now perspective invites a discussion of first principles. For this we return to Star and Ruhleder’s now-classic definition of infrastructure, originally composed for a paper on one of the early scientific collaboratories, the Worm Community System. They show how their definitions can be ordered along two axes: the social/technical and the local/global.