California Open Source Textbook Project

Sanford Forte is COSTP's Founder and Executive Director. Sanford is currently Director of Partnership and Business Development at Flat World Knowledge, a new, venture-backed Open license college textbook publisher

Sanford began his textbook publishing career with Prentice-Hall, followed by Holt-Rinehart, Little-Brown, Benjamin Cummings, Springer-Verlag (Telos Library of Science), and Addison-Wesley – serving many field sales and management functions within the textbook publishing enterprise. Sanford migrated to the digital technology and distributed information sectors, co-Founding Interactive Development Systems – a digital technology consultancy. IDS was formed as a strategic and business development consultancy that served many technology, academic publishing, music industry, and new media (including Internet) enterprise groups – among them Millimeter Magazine, Gibson/Oberheim, Apple Computer, New Media Magazine, On Command Video, Radius, SuperMac, Springer-Verlag (GDR), Samsung, LG (Korea), Stanford University’s Office of Technology and Licensing), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Starr Labs, and several others. Sanford has been part of three Silicon Valley startups: PixCube (consumer imaging); Snagg, Inc. (RFID-based supply chain and verification systems). Sanford has also served as domestic business development and M&A lead for British publishing giant United Business Media.

Sanford was co-founder at Telophase, a not-for-profit community broadband consultancy that advocated for local control of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH); Telophase created the widely discussed (within the FCC) concepts of "Communicative Assets" and "Broadband Bonds".

Most recently, Sanford was Senior Project and Research Consultant for the California Community College Open Educational Resources project - founded by current Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter, and funded by The Hewlett Foundation.

Currently, Sanford is consulting with and advising a wide range of educational publishers, OER organizations, education startups, and private equity groups interested in funding educational ventures as a natural extension of COSTP activities.

Sanford has spoken and written widely about open licensing, educational publishing reform, educational technology innovation, and the social benefits accruing from properly deployed public information and education infrastructures. Sanford holds degrees in Economics and Cognitive Science/Educational Technology.

Jay Schaefer is COSTP's Chief Technology Advisor. Jay is former CTO for Miller Freeman Inc./CMP publishing. He was co-Founder of TeloPhase, a not-for-profit community telecommunications startup dedicated to providing cost-effective broadband solutions communities across America by employing a unique revenue-sharing model that returns the majority of broadband subscriber profits back to municipalities.

Jay's experience includes over twenty years of software development ranging from embedded systems to database applications to online systems. Since 1990, Jay has been developing information systems using Internet technologies - developing, maintaining, and managing the technology supporting 300 plus commercial web sites serving over 3,000,000 pages per day in a 7x24 online environment.

Jay has been the primary architect of highly redundant and scalable web systems that incorporate n-tier Perl and Java based applications connected to relational databases. He has managed both internally and externally hosted data centers and has experience with engineering and implementing Internet/Intranet/Extranet (EDI) applications, cost savings analysis and implementation, budget development and management, web site integration with back office functionality (Oracle financials, fulfillment, etc.), disaster recovery planning and business resumption, business analysis, 7x24 operations, mergers and acquisitions, business process re-engineering, and staff development.

During his ten years with Lockheed, Jay provided internal consulting and systems engineering services for hardware and software based land, air, and space systems. From 1986 thru 1989, he was one of three partners in Advanced Timing Systems, manufactures of drag strip timing equipment. During this time, Jay was responsible for systems engineering and embedded systems programming. Jay received a BS degree in Meteorology from San Jose State University in 1985.

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