I’ve known ex-Sun CEO Scott McNealy for many years and while often hyperbolic he’s often right. When talking about one of his new pet projects, McNealy is both: “I think it is potentially as powerful as the Google idea or the MySpace idea.” But rather than referring to a multi-billion business opportunity that he is involved in, what McNealy is so excited about is Curriki - an open source community of educators, learners and committed education experts working together to provide a free, best-in-class, constantly updated curricula and instructional material set for grades K – 12. The project was originally launched in June 2004 as the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC), which operated under the vision statement of “The best world class learning, community developed and supported, just a click away.”

In contrast to many new open source projects, Curriki has limits on who can contribute and provides a forum for leading experts to collaborate. But like many of them, the hope for its success relies at least partially on the altruistic nature of people that want to improve the world. In the words of Scott, “All we have to do is get this started. There are enough noble people out there who will want to work on it.” While educators that contribute free labor and ideas receive direct value in the form of better materials, the site is by necessity dependent on a variety of contributions from others. This group includes participants like Congruent Software, Sun Microsystems, Fortis General Counsel, the U.N., and the Korea Education & Research information group.

It is hard to overstate how important such a project could be. While closing the digital divide is important for improving the living standards of billions of people around the world, Curriki compounds the benefit of doing so by providing the very best teaching resources to anyone that can access the web. Whatever the costs are of running this open source project – and they should be relatively small – the potential ROI that all of us could enjoy from closing the education gap is almost incalculable.