By 2000, the strategy to scale up SURWEB broadly by collaborating with like-minded projects across the country was a priority.  In 1999, SURWEB staff began work to streamline the SURWEB code and package it on a CD with a technical manual, allowing any interested agency to duplicate the SURWEB engine on another server.  

In December 1999, SURWEB made a presentation at the annual Western Cluster meeting of more than 40 Technology Innovation Challenge Grant project grantees.  At the annual meeting, SURWEB invited any project that wished to participate in a collaborative project to attend a “Bring Your Own Server” (BYOS) workshop to be held the last week of January 2000.  The original concept was to duplicate SURWEB.  However, during the course of the meeting, the attendees shaped a much broader vision of sharing media objects between several projects.  This allows server sites around the country to link their SURWEB database engine “clones” together and thus share data among and across projects (Spendlove, 2000).

SURWEB spent the first months in 2000 preparing and refining the technical engine to fit the broader, collaborative concept.  In February 2000, the project hosted two BYOS workshop and added a total of nine iMatrix members to the consortium.  In March 2000, SURWEB presented at the Florida Educators Technology Conference in Orlando, Florida. A report of iMatrix was generated from the Florida meeting and is located in Appendix G: Formative Evaluation of iMatrix Training for the Florida Learning Alliance.

The next month, SURWEB presented iMatrix to all Technology Innovation Challenge Grant Project grantees in Baltimore, Maryland.  By the end of the year, 2000, nine additional members are expected to join the iMatrix consortium for a total of eighteen members in eleven states.  Members of the consortium can be seen on the iMatrix web site at www.imatrix.org.

The iMatrix project is a way to scale up SURWEB by pooling the educationally content and technology assets of consortium members across the United States.  It offers mutually advantageous ways to bring the benefits of SURWEB to a wider audience of teachers and students.  In the process, iMatrix will enable technology researchers to learn more about the way that digital, networked multimedia can be used to improve teaching and learning across the curriculum.