Some Background

First established in mid 2006, the Mahara project started as collaborative venture funded by New Zealand's Tertiary Education Commission's e-learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF) which was a contestable funding pool. Massey Universityled the project with collaborative partners, Auckland University of Technology, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, and Victoria University of Wellington. Each organisation had representation on the project Steering Group and this team included Richard Wyles from Flexible Learning Network who was leading aligned projects with Moodle on behalf of an Open Polytechnic led consortium, and further open source work with the Fedora repository system.  

In July 2007, Flexible Learning and Catalyst IT started collectively managing and supporting the project with their own time and resources plus further support from New Zealand’s Ministry of Education for a national ePortfolio service for schools - see MyPortfolio. A significant redevelopment of the views framework was made possible from Mellon Foundation funds from the Open Polytechnic’s winning a 2007 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.

This period saw Mahara mature to version 1.0 production release in mid-2008. From there the project has benefited from a widening pool of contributors - a good sign of a successful open source community. 

Worldwide Contributors - Organisations

The University of Glasgow have funded several pieces of work for us, including View Templates, part of Import/Export (the HTML export is thanks to them), and various bug fixes.

GLISI/Ray Merrill funded enhancements to Mahara's groups, and Ray has provided much invaluable guidance around Mahara's usabilty.

With JISC funding we were able to add import/export functionality to the Mahara e-portfolio system, as part of the 1.2 release. This work University of London Computer Centre, University of Glasgow and JISC Cetis.

A collaborative group in the State of New Hampshire funded the ability to submit Mahara Views for assessment in Moodle, through a grant from the New Hampshire Department of Education. This collaborative group consisted of the following school districts:

• Exeter Region Cooperative
• Windham
• Oyster River
• Farmington
• Newmarket  

Individuals

We make special mention of Heinz Krettek, our first ever fan. He has been lurking in IRC on and off since late 2006, maintains the German language pack and his own Mahara support site over at http://ewiesion.com/. Thanks, Heinz!

Special mention also goes to these contributors (in no particular order), who have made contributions of code, time, documentation, or other contributions:

• Howard Miller
• David Mudrak
• Inaki Arenaza
• Mari Cruz García
• Antonio Piedras
• Kristina D.C. Hoeppner
• Mitsuhiro Yoshida
• Derrin Kent
• Phillip Butler
• James Ballard
• Matt Oquist
• Dan Poltawski
• Gregor Anželj
• Simon Grant
• Mark Nichols
• Mark Brown - Dr Mark Brown, Director of Distance Education at Massey University, is the inaugural chair of the International Academic Advisry Group for Mahara.