The 8th OpenACS/dotLRN Conference was celebrated on November 4th and 5th, 2009 and it was organized by Instuto Tecnólogico de Costa Rica. The conference allowed to participating universities and organizations share its knowledge and experience in the building of community-oriented web applications using the Free and Open Source Software, in the fields of Education and Research.

The articles included in the conference shows how the universities and organizations focus their work to strengthen classroom education and distance education using social networking, collaborative concept mapping, and to improve the monitoring of student progress, in the university context.

Periodic conferences OpenACS/.LRN brings together universities and organizations working with the development toolkit OpenACS and the e-learning system dotLRN to promote collaborative development and improvement of services and applications that these platforms offer.

The articles was published under the ISBN 978-9968-641-00-5.