Moodle: Using Learning Communities to Create an Open Source Course Management System

In his blog post introducing this paper, Stephen Downes says: "There are many lessons to be learned from the development of Moodle, not the least of which is how the creators used learning communities to help them build a product to support learning communities." The paper was written in 2003, co-authored by the founder of Moodle, so it's a now-historical look at the beginnings of and ideas behind the Moodle open source strategy. (At the time, the paper indicated a sense of Moodle's future: "The system is already proving quite successful...")