I had to leave a before the end of the Sun ERC conference yesterday to catch a flight but I participated in a few very worthwhile sessions earlier in the day. The opening sessions were excellent. Greg Papadopoulos kicked things off with a discussion of cloud computing. His talk wove together the central idea of sharing to create communities, and communities creating markets with some of the changes we're seeing as a result of the commoditization of technology services, as well as the interplay between open source software and software as a service.

The next act was a very entertaining and thought provoking talk about the characteristics and evolution of generations from the G.I. Generation to the Millenials. I'll probably be reading his book "Millenials Rising" soon. I snapped a couple of shots from his slides but they didn't come out very well.

The whole event is recorded so if you have some time and didn't make the event you might check it out.

After lunch I participated in a repeat panel session on administrative computing with Casey Green (Campus Computing Project), Jonathan Markow (JA-SIG), Robert Sherratt (University of Hull), Jay Visvanathan (Sun). The session focused on administrative systems like Kuali Financial System, uPortal, CAS, Kuali Student, and in general, the impact of open source in this area and the challenges. The challenges discussed were, not suprisingly, about people, change, and processes rather than technology. One of the key challenges we discussed a bit was what I'll call the "consumability" of open source software. There's a belief that open source software doesn't fit into the accepted procurement practices, that the cost structures and risk analysis is very different, etc. Casey noted the rather significant rise of enterprise open source (10% of the schools responding to the Campus Computing Survey said they'd standardized on an open source eLearning platform). Robert also discussed the University of Hull's recent selection of Sakai and how they evaluated the viability of the communities and commercial support for the open source contenders as they did the viability of the companies for the proprietary choices. I commented on the spectrum of open source adoption. On one end, you have institutions that consume open source software the same way they've consumed proprietary software in the past. They purchase it from a company like rSmart or Sun using standard procurement practices, they get training, implementation support, legal assurances, a number to call when there's a problem, and regular software updates and maintenance. On the other end of the spectrum institutions download the software, compile and deploy it themselves, and have developers and system engineers to maintain and support it on campus. Of course it's not black and white. One of the great things about open source is that institutions have a choice and can find the point along that spectrum that suits them best at any point in time. From a participation and contribution perspective, institutions at either end of the spectrum contribute to the community in different ways: At the "consume" end, the school is paying a commercial organization who is immersed and contributing on their behalf; At the "DIY (do it yourself)" end the school is typically engaged directly writing code, testing, and contributing in a variety of ways.