USC Joins Kuali Foundation
I gave a talk at Campus Technology in D.C. this past week after being in New Orleans for Kuali meetings and NACUBO where we announced that University of Southern California has joined the Kuali Foundation as an investor in the Kuali Financial System project. One of the key points of my talk was that the open source communities like Sakai and Kuali are very different than other communities I'm familiar with. Within the communities we refer to what we're doing as Community Source to emphasize the differences. In my talk I used the Cathedral and Bazaar metaphor to talk about Community Source as a blend that benefits from the energy, transparency, and pace of the bazaar and still benefits from the coordination, planning, and predictability of the cathedral.
Investments and institutional commitments like the one USC just made provide the means for Community Source projects like Kuali to achieve the blend. After a few of us read The Ignorance of Crowds recently, Brad Wheeler joked that "Community Source is that Pub between the Cathedral and the Bazaar where we get our work done."
cdcoppola:
Jason, I go back & forth on this myself. I don't think it's so much "different from open-source" as it is different than many people's notion of open source. If you think of the Cathedral and the Bazaar anchoring ends of the spectrum, then there's probably very few real world examples that fit in those "true forms."
Even though Apache, Linux, GNOME, as you point out, have participation and sponsorship from major companies, there's something somewhat unique about the way institutions participate in our communities that seems different than those examples. Maybe the difference lies in the fact that the applications we're developing are end-user applications higher in the stack.
It's still early in the evolution of these "community source" communities, but there are some good example of large-scale projects where some number of institutions turn over local resources for a shared project that's managed by a project manager at another institution. The examples I'm thinking of range from 10's of millions on some of the Kuali projects, to 10's of thousands on sub-projects in the Sakai community.
Jason Shao:
Is "community source" really different from open-source? Apache, Linux, GNOME - most of the big open-source communities have participation and sponsorship from major companies and organizations, release planning, etc.
Also, despite some of the emphasis that various Community Source advocates have placed on planning and predictability, the mechanisms for enforcing and executing those plans still seem unclear -- having made a plan, given that resources are still owned by participants, how are plans executed? Or, to be more precise, does that process really differ from typical open-source processes?
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