I'm in seat 14E (middle seat because I forgot to check in online yesterday) on my way to Chicago. I'm headed to the NACUBO conference where I'll be speaking about the Kuali community with Kathleen McNeely (AVP at Indiana University and Kuali Financial System's business leader), and Rich Andrews, Controller at UC Irvine (an investing and implementing institution).
Yesterday I updated my iPhone with the 2.0 software which wiped out all my music. Somehow the only audio that made it through the upgrade and restore was Ira Fuchs' speech from the 2008 JASIC summer conference. It's well worth a listen if you haven't already heard it. Since I've got a couple hours to kill on the plane I took some notes from the recording. Hopefully they'll inspire you to listen for yourself. :-)
Ira Fuchs directs a program at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that has been instrumental as a catalyst to launch some of the most important open source projects in Education by providing seed funding. Kuali, Sakai, and OSP are the ones I care most about but there is a long list of other important projects like Fluid, Bamboo, and Zotero that are making a real difference in education.
Ira's talk this past summer was focused on the impediments to widespread acceptance of open source software in education. He recognizes that virtually every campus is using Linux and other infrastructure software but some of the education specific applications that have the greatest potential to offer institutions greater strategic agility and more control over their own destiny.
Why doesn't every campus in global higher education use open source software applications? Ira characterizes the impediments in terms of legal, economic, organizational, and psychological factors. He urges the participants at the conference to understand why campuses choose to participate and why many, beyond the community source subculture don't.
Why should we care about adoption? "Communities are living things. Like all living things when they stop growing they start to die." says ira. He notes that not all growth measured in adoption but for now, more adoption is important. The network effect arising from growth driven by adoption leads to : higher quality software (given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow); more feedback from higher usage; greater capacity as a community to develop and to support each other; more peer users who help each other and reduce support costs. He also notes that investors (like Mellon) find greater social returns and that adoption attracts more commercial involvement.
The obstacles
Legal obstacles - The good news is that campus leaders don't seem to be overly concerned about insurmountable legal obstacles. However, open source software and projects are held to higher standards. It's an irrational position notes Ira. Campuses routinely take far greater risks than anything yet demonstrated from open source software. He credits software foundations like Sakai and Kuali who hold IP and have strong IP management practices for reducing risk.
Economic, organizational, and perceptual obstacles...
Ira notes that overall IT capacity in higher education will continue to decline as many institutions outsource more IT functions. Given this:
"If there's anyone here that still believes that vendors are unimportant to the long-term success of our projects, then it's time to lose that delusion. Vendors are essential even for big institutions, and essential for small ones."
I really identify with Ira when he says "it's startling when a senior leader at a higher institution believes that his/her institution needs to have substantial IT capacity even to consider participating."
He cites that many of the institutional adoptions of Mellon-funded software over the past couple of years were vendor supported. For projects like Kuali he says the number is "virtually 100%." He doesn't mention rSmart specifically but I believe rSmart has worked with nearly every institution considering or implementing Kuali applications to-date.
He encourages participants to note that statistic:
"That's a statistic that should be on everyone's tongue's when we're talking with institutional leaders. Many of the institutions had the capacity to implement on their own, but chose to work with vendors in order to mitigate the risks of going it alone. That's a strategy we can expect to see much more often as time goes by."
There's a real lack of understanding what the real total cost of ownership is for these open source applications. Ira calls for better empirical data about the real costs and notes that this is critically important if we are to compete with what proprietary vendors insinuate about costs. It's an obstacle, he says, that we need to get past in order to get to the more strategic benefits of open source: Greater strategic agility and greater control of destiny. He notes a statement Brad Wheeler, the CIO at Indiana University made about the need for pragmatic arguments:
"If tomorrow I got a new provost who wanted to know who are all these people taking my paychecks and siting in my offices but reporting to people at Cornel and Michigan and producing software that IU doesn't own. I can't then respond by talking about the virtues of altruism or the glory of open source. I need to have a spreadsheet that shows exactly how it's in our institutional interests."
Many institutional leaders still see open source as anti commercial or unprofessional... they don't trust it. They don't realize that developers are just as professional as counterparts at proprietary software companies, and that these projects are highly organized with strong engineering practices.
He concludes the first part of his talk with a call to action: Produce more and better marketing materials. He notes that most people outside the community source subculture still judge the risks of open source as higher and the benefits as lower than proprietary alternatives. "Some of this misperception," he says "is rooted in simple ignorance, though proprietary vendors, seeking to preserve their market position, nurture of of it too." (Ira was being kind. Many proprietary vendors use their full marketing arsenal to support these misperceptions.)
The only way to overcome these widespread misperceptions, Ira says, is through clear consistent communication. He notes that everyone involved must "communicate the value over and over again, understandably and effectively until a more accurate perception settles in."
He uses Zotero as a positive example how end users can be empowered to do a projects "selling" on campus. He talks about how essential it is for community members to develop screencasts, online demos, podcasts, and good marketing materials to help end users in their efforts to overcome institutional objections.
These self-help selling tools require a significant investment. I know because for the Sakai and Kuali communities rSmart is probably the organization investing most heavily in developing these things. Ira has some great suggestions for leveraging institutions' significant marketing resources so that the responsibility doesn't fall entirely on professional open source companies like rSmart. I think he's right on and I'll be doing my part to encourage that kind of collaboration to build on the development collaboration that's already working so well.
