I’m not old enough to remember Xerox PARC, but its contributions to modern software and GUI design haven’t passed me lightly. Now, Xerox is looking to do homage to that explosion of innovation in the 1970s with an open research site that will allow users hands-on access to developing R&D projects. The site, according to a spokesperson, will aid Xerox not only in crowdsourcing beta testers and advance development in the cloud; but also aid Xerox in deciding which direction to go with nascent ventures.

Open Xerox arrived February 24^th 2011, and for the broad strokes of the project we found Grant Gross of IT World reporting,

Open Xerox, launched Thursday, allows participants to use some cutting-edge technology while providing feedback to Xerox, said Victor Ciriza, lab manager at the Xerox Research Centre Europe. Users will be able to incorporate many of the technologies in their own websites, with Xerox providing output through HTML or open APIs (application programming interfaces), he said.

The new website will allow Xerox to have new products that are “robust and well tested,” Ciriza said. With the crowd-sourcing site, Xerox is hoping for immediate feedback on the projects so that the company can improve the research, he said.

But the benefits extend beyond the company, he added. “The end user is going to access world-class research on topics that may not accessible through out-of-the-box projects,” he said.

Some examples of their current work include an amazing linguistic (and English language tool) innovation in their Arabic Morphological Analyzer. The program takes standard Arabic words and parses them into a morphological analysis and English notation. In linguistics, a morphological analysis is the identification of works based on how they are structured. For students of language and people attempting to write software that translates between languages, software capable of doing this as accurately as possible makes translation software work.

Victor Ciriza let it be known that Xerox intends to release a new project every week onto Open Xerox.

Earlier last year, Xerox released Trailmeme, an organization and social method for following your own research on the web and sharing it with others. Trailmeme enables a highly social contextualization of working data by producing “trails” that follow a user as the move through data they’re viewing.

Between Open Xerox and Trailmeme, it’s obvious that Xerox has the intent to leap into the surge of highly social people-coupled-with-technology development styles. In fact, the new open research site reminds me a lot of what Google did with Google Labs, except that instead of reaching out through a product, Xerox will be reaching out through their brand.

Perhaps we’ll see the next Xerox PARC in action.