In the past few months I've attended the most recent Sakai and Kuali community events. Aside from adding to my collection of great polo shirts I'm also reminded how important these face to face gatherings are. While these communities are very productive working as a globally distributed team, there's no substitute for the connections made face to face.

Attendees at these community events often remark that they need a forum to engage campus leaders who don't typically attend the community events.

I'm really pleased to see and support a new event with this in mind. Mark your calendars for The OPEN Forum. It takes place December 7-9 in Palm Springs, CA.

From the event website: 

The OPEN Forum provides an opportunity for leaders and decision makers from colleges and universities to come together to enhance their understanding and vision for openness across higher education.

The vision for The OPEN Forum is lofty. We seek to increase the strategic benefit of technology in higher education. We believe that this can be done by bringing together a diverse group of great minds and investing time to understand and to evaluate the intricacies of this new open environment.

To this end, the forum will be centered on A DIALOGUE, fed by insightful keynotes and facilitated to allow for talking, listening, debating, sharing, building, debunking and learning. We believe that the dialogue must ADDRESS THE OPPORTUNITIES AND COMPLEXITIES of openness that often require a fundamentally different approach to defining and evaluating options with a broader scope of impact.

The participants include HIGHER EDUCATION EXECUTIVES who have the ability to affect change, as well as the insight of corporate colleagues who have grappled with similar issues.

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.

There's an elegantly articulated post in the Blackboard blog about educational choice and diversity and an interesting thread of conversation among the Sakai community commenting on it. Though the post is superficially supportive of choice, openness, and diversity, it seems to me that it's more a marketing attempt to lay claim to the platform on which scholarly technologies will run. In other words, choice and diversity as long as you get to it through the Blackboard platform and pay them for it.  

The commentary from the Sakai community have been diverse. Some have asked good questions like "how can we ensure open collaboration that will benefit all." Others have noted that the Sakai community is already well on it's way to delivering the platform that Bb is marketing but has yet to really commit to (note the disclaimer at the end of the post). Brad Wheeler, CIO at Indiana University made some very lucid points about the purposeful design of the Sakai community and our IP that permits Blackboard to use Sakai software to accomplish its goals, and about the divergence of their goals from those of the education community, and probably most importantly about where the education community should focus it's attention.   

It seems to me that the education community, and particularly the Sakai community is better positioned to deliver and sustain the platform. We have a proven ability to innovate and have been on the platform course for some time. Further, it seems in the community's best interest to keep the platform open and encourage those interested (commercial and non-commercial) to innovate and build on it. A key motivation for many of the universities who have chosen the Sakai path is to regain control over their destiny on the technology that is so core to delivering on their mission. Relegating the platform to a monopoly just isn't consistent with this goal.

Blackboard realizes that if they are to achieve their revenue growth and profit goals they must do more than sell course management systems. They clearly have their sights set on owning the platform and monetizing anything that runs on it. The Sakai community also has it's sights set on becoming the platform and doing it in a way that is open and accessible to everyone: truly providing choice and diversity as Blackboard's marketing positions their ProjectNG. I think this puts their goals for the platform at odds with the Sakai community's goals for the platform because if it's "owned" (by Bb) then institutions will continue to have insufficient control over their own destiny.

In my estimation, Sakai's challenge won't be developing and sustaining the best platform on which to build and connect educational software and content. Our challenge will be competing with Blackboard's powerful marketing machine.  We'll need to be cautious as we proceed to make sure we don't help feed the machine in ways that prevent the market at large from understanding their options.

I'm en route to Paris for the 9th Sakai conference Saturday morning writing on the plane. Before boarding I ran across an interesting and very relevant post about the French government support for open source.

The post describes a competitiveness cluster in Paris called SYSTEM@TIC PARIS-REGION, that has established a working group on open source (Logiciel Libre) who's goal is to "help structure the open source ecosystem in the Paris area."

Aside from the serendipity of being on my way to Paris for an open source conference when I ran across the post, it touches on something I've been thinking a lot about lately: The sustainability of the Sakai and Kuali open source communities. Specifically I've been thinking about what the ecosystem around these communities will need to look like in order to be sustainable. Stakeholders will want to help architect the new ecosystem and foster it's evolution as they appear to be doing in Paris:

The state played a key role, by providing a framework, the competitiveness cluster, and the funding necessary to catalyze the interest of the actors.

The Sakai and Kuali communities are developing open source enterprise business applications that offer alternatives to what a recent Linux.com article called the "last bastion of the proprietary software giants - [ERP]."

These projects and the ecosystems forming around them are changing fundamental aspects of how software is produced and consumed in education. While we're seeing some great progress, there's substantial inertia to overcome if these efforts are going to produce systemic change. Further, beyond the natural inclination to resist change, there are those who profit from the old regime protecting the status quo with all their might.

Leading colleges and universities like Cambridge, Stanford, UBC, and Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (the location of the upcoming Sakai conference) are investing and working collaboratively to drive these initiatives and overcome the natural inertia. Companies like IBM, Sun, and rSmart are involved as well as foundations like Mellon and Hewlett who have provided a great deal of seed funding for the development of the software. There's a lot of cooperative effort going into these projects from a variety of stakeholders. Still, there's quite a bit of inertia and deliberate protection of the status quo. Programs like the one in Paris will be an important part of the equation.

In "The Educational Software Paradox: Can We Learn To Unlearn?," Trent Batson talks about how educational software like the Sakai CLE, Blackboard, Angel, D2L, Moodle, and other systems are caught in a paradox. Though technology would seem to be capable of transforming the way we learn and teach, the systems are stuck reinforcing the status quo. Instead of being designed for transformation they are designed in a way that mirrors the way things are done today and caters to the majority of stakeholders who'd just assume not change.

Trent mentions a hope that open source software might be part of the answer but acknowledges projects like Sakai and Moodle seem to be stuck similar to the proprietary systems--another paradox. We'd certainly expect that, free of the economic limitations of the proprietary model, open source educational software would be "breaking the mold."  Some open source educational software, LAMS for example, arguably is. Mostly though I think Trent is right.

Sakai and Moodle, two of the best alternatives to the proprietary systems, don't really break the mold... yet. At least the software doesn't. But Sakai, for example, is more than just software. Sakai is a community that's capable of developing and sustaining software collaboratively. It's a path one can travel along with other education institutions. I believe it's a path that will consistently produce the best software, and yes, I believe it will eventually break the mold. But first it has to satisfy the majority.  

What we have today is the foundation for change. The latest Sakai release performs at the status quo as well as Blackboard (better in many ways). It's being adopted and used much like the proprietary systems. But unlike the proprietary systems, Sakai is more than just an application. It's a platform on which many of the world's leading institutions are beginning to innovate. Sakai is a single environment that provides the expected capabilities to serve the status quo *and* serves as a platform on which the innovators and early adopters can drive the more transformative agenda--a foundation for change.

The fact is, we've seen lots of innovative and transformative technology used for teaching and learning. Though it often fails to reach the mainstream users. One reason is that there hasn't been a widely adopted platform on which innovators can build. Until now. Sakai is a platform on which transformative educational technologies can be developed, sustained by a large community, and on which these innovations can reach the mainstream users. 

Of course, changing culture and habits is the truly difficult part. Like Trent, I wonder how many are ready to "unlearn their comfort zone."

Late last year I bookmarked the Creative Commons Launches CC0 and CC+ Programs press release to look into at some point. I finally got around to it this week and I'm sure I'll take advantage of these great new tools to help balance the spirit of open sharing of IP with the need to grow a profitable business around open source software.  

The new protocols (they are not actually new licenses) are very straightforward and easy to use. This is something CC has always done very well IMHO. So what are they for?

CC0 - CC Zero is a simple protocol to waive all rights to a work. It's like putting a work in the public domain but CC Zero appears to be better because it's more explicit and works better internationally.

CC+ - CC Plus is an addition to the CC licensing architecture that enables the cross-over between the "sharing economy" and the "commercial economy." It makes it very straightforward to offer additional permissions to CC licensed content. The most obvious use case is to profit commercially from CC licensed content by starting with a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license and using the CC Plus protocol to permit commercial use for a fee. It would look something like this:

In the open source software licensing world there's a concept called "dual licensing" that has been used to accomplish a similar objective. The CC+ literature does a great job describing the concept and making it easy to implement. 

We hear a lot about open everything in the media today. Open source software, open content, open innovation, even open source beer. :-)  The big consultants and analysts are catching up with what's happening and making predictions about mainstream implications of the trends toward openness. 

We don't hear a lot about the legal underpinnings that are enabling these trends. In fact, the legal infrastructure is one of a few key enableers along with the ubiquity of web-based collaboration and workflow software that connects people to get things done. Without these two things I don't think the two efforts I'm most involved in (Sakai and Kuali) would be possible.

It's interesting that the CC+ literature talks about bridging the "sharing economy" and the "commercial economy." One of the core values and a key to sustainability of the Sakai and Kuali  communities is commercial involvement. From the beginning these communities have been architected to evolve the software ecosystem in education and enable a new commercial model that fits with the institutions' abilities to lead the development of their key business systems. It's one of the things that sets Sakai and Kuali apart from similar initiatives that have come and gone in education. It'll be interesting to see how/if the CC+ license plays a role in enabling our goals.

If you've been waiting for a convenient way to keep up with the Kuali community check out the shiny new monthly newsletter. Subscribe by emailing Jennifer Foutty.

What's Kuali? Well it's "the most important activity in higher education today" according to Dennis Dougherty, SVP for Finance and CFO at University of Southern California. This was from his Keynote at Kuali Days VI in Chicago last month where nearly 450 people participated in Kuali's semi-annual meeting. The venue for Kuali Days VII has just been finalized so mark your calendar and join us in Newport Beach. 

Red Hat settled a patent dispute this week that had potentially wide reaching impact to the open source community. Matt Asay points out nicely that Red Hat has demonstrated the open-source way to quash patent lawsuits. 

"Typically when a company settles a patent lawsuit, it focuses on
getting safety for itself," said Rob Tiller, Vice President and
Assistant General Counsel, IP [Red Hat]. "But that was not enough for
us, we wanted broad provisions that covered our customers, who place
trust in us, and the open source community, whose considerable efforts
benefit our business."

This particular suit hits close to home as Sakai and Kuali, two open source projects that mean a lot to me, both use Hibernate, which was the target of this particular attack.

I've verified my interpretation with several people (including real attorneys) and Red Hat's settlement seems to cover Sakai and Kuali. Red Hat's approach to this makes good business sense for them but still we shouldn't take it for granted. It only makes good business sense for them because they truly understand the value of their open source ecosystem and because they've adopted the right set of values to be successful in that ecosystem. Thank you Red Hat from the Sakai and Kuali communities

One troubling thing about all of this is the ongoing threat patents pose to the software world. One article commenting on the Red Hat settlement applaud's Red Hat but points out that "pointed out an opinion that this is an example of patent trolls getting smarter. (By the way it's interesting that the article lumps Blackboard into the patent troll category). The article points out that  "what we're really seeing here is a skillful example of patent gamesmanship by the troll."

The National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) announced last week Indiana University is the recipient of the association’s 2008 Innovation Award. The NACUBO Awards program is focused on innovation in the management of college and university business and financial affairs.

“With the KUALI Financial System, Indiana University exemplifies how colleges and universities are working diligently to operate efficiently and to save money,” notes John Walda, president and CEO of NACUBO.

The award goes on to say that "KFS demonstrates that higher-education-specific software can be developed through the successful collaboration of a community of institutions."

As you can imagine, NACUBO is a pretty conservative group. I remember in one of the foundational discussions before we actually started Kuali where Casey Green was reporting on his analysis of a survey we conducted of the NACUBO membership. According to Casey the data suggested "affirmative ambivalence" toward open source administrative applications.

The NACUBO award and the growing numbers attending Kuali Days (more that 400 people from nearly a hundred colleges and universities in Chicago a few weeks ago) seem to indicate that we've moved past the "affirmative ambivalence" era.

I haven't seen the actual gartner survey yet but based on the interview posted this morning in Campus Technology it apparently points to two interesting trends:

1. Many are moving to open source (partially driven by a rejection of Blackboard's behavior).
2. A non-trivial amount are moving toward "home grown" though it appears that this is more about "assembling" from small pieces loosley joined, rather than the traditional "build."

It's not at all surprising that Gartner Research Director Marti Harris says:

[Blackboard is] seen as [having] a certain arrogance to think that they developed something [themselves], when so many academics feel they've contributed to it all along. I can't speak to the legal issues at hand, but that's the perception, and it's global. I hear that wherever I go.

So has the suit had an impact on our clients? One thing I hear from clients is that it's irritating to think that their license fees are going to support a big legal battle. They feel as if they're paying for that.

It's good to know that Blackboards customers realize they are paying for senseless litigation driven by arrogance instead of product innovation or support.

It's also interesting that Gartner believes it's accelerating interest in Desire2Learn, Sakai, and Moodle. I've been living and breathing the movement toward open source for some time so none of this is surprising.

What's really interesting is point #2 about the trend toward assembling solutions based on Web 2.0 applications living out in the cloud (if you're playing buzzword bingo you just scored). I was in Sausalito last week with some customers and Michael Korcuska talking about future directions and Nate Angell whipped together an example that mirrors much of the functionality found in Sakai/Moodle/Blackboard/Etc. using Ning as the base framework and tools like Hiveminder, pbWiki, and DabbleDB. Keep an eye out for a Jing screencast of what he did. It's representative of what many are doing on campus today.

I'm glad to see the Sakai community recognizing this and envisioning a future in which Sakai plays a role making it more effective to do that sort of thing while dealing with some of the things that make assembling something like that difficult, hard to support, or hard to scale.