Open Wonderland

Leadership

Staff

Nicole Yankelovich, Executive Director
Jonathan Kaplan, Wonderland Architect
Katheryn Aten, Secretary

Board of Directors

Dilip Bagrecha, President and Chairman of the Board
Nicole Yankelovich Mordecai, Foundation Director
Warren Schaeffer, Treasurer
Anne Massey
Andy Zbinden

Former Board Members

Lisa Gonzalez, Wayne State University
Rolf Pfeiffer, University of Zurich
Eleni Stroulia, University of Alberta

Open Wonderland Foundation Mission

The Open Wonderland Foundation is a non-profit corporation. Its mission is to maintain, enhance, and support the Open Wonderland open source virtual world platform. This platform, based entirely on open standards, is a free and open source toolkit designed to create 3D virtual worlds for education, business, and government applications. These kinds of virtual worlds have several distinct advantages. More so than other collaboration technologies, virtual worlds provide participants with a genuine sense of immersion, engagement, and involvement. They also provide one of the most effective means of communication for team work and learning, supporting multiple simultaneous conversations and multiple simultaneous activities in a single virtual space.

To fulfill its mission, the Foundation has two roles. The first is to support and evolve Open Wonderland by providing access to a stable platform and advancing the system through the development of software and documentation. The second role is to foster a vibrant community of educators, students, software developers, artists, entrepreneurs, and others by providing education, training, and technical support. This support is offered through web-based content, community discussion forums, and community events, both live and "in-world."

Financial support for the Foundation is garnered through paid memberships, partnerships with corporations, grants, and donations. To contribute to the success of the Open Wonderland Foundation, please see the various ways you can support us.

Supporters

The Open Wonderland Foundation relies on donations of all sorts. We would like to acknowledge and thank the following people and organizations for helping the Foundation to accomplish its mission.

	Virtual Learning Labs has provided the seed funding for the Open Wonderland Foundation, as well the leadership and vision to bring the Foundation into existence.
	Gary Ritchie, Designer + Digital Artist, donated his time to create the Open Wonderland logo and update the web site template.
	Andy Updegrove and Peter Moldave of GesmerUpdegrove provided consulting on open source licensing and other issues.
	St. Paul College has graciously donated a number of servers for use by the Open Wonderland open source community.

Please contact us if you would like to make an in-kind donation to the Open Wonderland Foundation.