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Contacts across the border
SURFfoundation attaches a great deal of importance to international collaboration with organisations that share SURF’s aim of promoting innovation and the development of new applications in ICT. SURFfoundation is a member of various organisations and partnerships and participates in European projects and programmes.

SURFfoundation is a formal member of:

• Knowledge Exchange, a long-term partnership between four national funding organisations in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
  
  
• E-Framework, a joint initiative by JISC, SURFfoundation, and the ministries of education and research in Australia and New Zealand, focusing on sharing expertise, standardisation, and the reuse of concepts and components in the area of service-oriented architecture.

In Europe, SURFfoundation collaborates with:

• ALT, the Association for Learning Technology
  ALT seeks to bring together all those with an interest in the use of learning technology. After a highly effective period of formal collaboration, a decision was taken in 2007 to continue collaboration on the basis of informal exchanges between SURFfoundation and the organisations and communities that are members of ALT.
  
  
• DEFF, Denmark’s Electronic Research Library and Media Agency
  DEFF concerns itself with a large number of projects and innovative developments in the fields of ICT, the media, and library science. The object of the organisation is to improve ICT applications as they relate to support for teaching and research. SURFfoundation collaborates with DEFF via Knowledge Exchange.
  
  
• DFG, the German Research Foundation
  The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) is the central, self-governing research funding organisation that promotes research at universities and other publicly financed research institutions in Germany. It allocates funding in much the same way as the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). There are many shared concerns as regards the SURFShare programme and infrastructure issues. SURFfoundation collaborates with DEFF via Knowledge Exchange.
  
  
• EUNIS, the European University Information Systems
  EUNIS’s aim is to encourage exchanges, cooperation and debates between the persons responsible for information systems in higher education and research institutes/organisations within Europe. It also works to establish and maintain relationships with supervisory organisations and the business sector in each country as well as at the European level. Besides SURF, more than 20 institutions in the Netherlands are members of EUNIS.
  
  
• JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee
  JISC supports secondary and higher education in the use of ICT for teaching purposes, at both infrastructural and application level. JISC is the British counterpart of SURF and the two organisations maintain close contact at strategic and programme level. Collaboration is partly within Knowledge Exchange.
  

SURF participates in the following European projects:

• SURFfoundation has contributed in a number of ways to the DRIVER project, which involves a partnership of universities and other research institutions that are working together to set up a European repositories infrastructure.
  
  
• PEER
  
  
• Ten-Competence
  

Outside Europe, SURFfoundation has close contacts with:

• CNI, the Coalition for Networked Information
  This organisation is dedicated to the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. Its activities and expertise development focus on information management, e-libraries, and repositories. SURF has been a member of CNI since 2005.
  
  
• EDUCAUSE
  EDUCAUSE’s aim is “Transforming Education Through Information Technologies”. The organisation promotes the use of ICT in higher education. Most American universities are members, as are a large number elsewhere. The annual EDUCAUSE conference is one of the biggest in the world in the area of education and research, IT, and management. SURFfoundation has been a member of EDUCAUSE since 1998 and organises a large-scale annual attendance at the conference (“EduTrip”).
  
  
• ECAR, the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research
  ECAR is part of EDUCAUSE. Its mission is to foster better decision-making by conducting and disseminating research and analysis about the role and implications of information technology in higher education. As a member of ECAR, SURF has access to all the studies and survey results and direct access to experts in a variety of fields with a view to consultation and presentations. SURF has been a member of ECAR since 2004.
  
  
• ELI, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, is part of EDUCAUSE. It aims to bring about improvements in education by focusing on “the learner, learning principles and processes, and learning technologies”. ELI encourages collaboration through seminars and workshops (including online) and offers a wide range of practical guidelines. There are many shared concerns as regards the Platform for ICT and Education. SURFfoundation has been a member of ELI since 2008.
  
  
• SURFfoundation is a member of the worldwide non-profit IMS Global Learning Consortium. As a contributing member, SURFfoundation makes an active contribution to developing standards and specifications for learning technology. It also represents the interests of the Dutch higher education sector within the organisation.
  
  
• SURFfoundation is a member of the SAKAI Community (Synchronised Architecting of Knowledge Acquisition Infrastructure), the major open source/open access initiative in the United States. Four leading American universities (Indiana, Michigan, MIT, and Stanford) are collaborating on the basis of their own applications and open-source applications to create the next generation of Electronic Learning Environments (ELE). Interested institutions can participate in SEPP, the SAKAI Educational Partner Program. The Dutch institutions participating are SURFfoundation, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Twente.
  
  
• SURFfoundation is a member of the OAI rights working group. The international OAI rights working group was set up by the international Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and the UK’s RoMEO project. The latter – an initiative by JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) – also focuses on Open Access.