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.

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.

Great presentation on Opencast, an open-source project aimed at building a technology infrastructure and community sharing best practices around lecture/event capture, processing, archiving, distribution, and effective use of podcasting for teaching and learning. Mara Hancock talks about the importance of Opencast in a post about the planning grant. 

The Opencast community appears to be organized around many of the same community values as the Sakai and Fluid communities. In fact the Opencast software is being developed to work with Sakai and to use Fluid. In the presentation they talk about how the application is architected so that it could also be run standalone or integrated in other eLearning environments like Moodle.  

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."

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.

Last week Google faithfully notified me that Blackboard had responded to the USPTO rejection of their 'Alcorn' patent. It's maddening to think how much of a drain this whole thing has been to the education community. I didn't want to contribute any more to so I resisted posting anything about it. This morning I see that they are petitioning to have the USPTO drop the whole thing so that they can just get everything worked out in East Texas where they've been successful to-date.

It would be a real shame if the USPTO allowed Blackboard to circumvent the whole process and deferred to the courts. Remember that there are two filings in the USPTO against the patent. The inter-partes filing between Blackboard and Desire2Learn, and the ex-partes filing by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) who filed on behalf of the education community. Blackboard is asking the USPTO to abandon both of these and let the courts settle it.

The latest D2L post :

April, 2008 – Matthew Small, Blackboard's Chief Legal Officer:

"Certainly we believe the reexamination process is a healthy process. It serves to generally strengthen patents, and this case is no different."

http://www.thejournal.com/articles/22358

May, 2008 – Blackboard's filing with the Patent & Trademark Office:

"Patent Owner Blackboard Inc. ("Blackboard") hereby petitions the Office to suspend the inter partes reexamination between Blackboard and Third Party Requester Desire2Learn Inc. . . ."

Petition To Suspend Inter Partes Reexamination Under 35 U.S.C 6314(C)

Kim Thanos sent me a link last week to an interesting thread of discussion that I hadn't been paying much attention to: The Creepy Treehouse:

creepy treehouse
see also creepy treehouse effect

n. A place, physical or virtual (e.g. online), built by adults with the intention of luring in kids.

Example: “Kids … can see a [creepy treehouse] a mile away and generally do a good job in avoiding them.” John Krutsch in Are You Building a Creepy Treehouse?”

n. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.

Such institutional environments are often seen as more artificial in their construction and usage, and typically compete with pre-existing systems, environments, or applications. creepy treehouses also have an aspect of closed-ness, where activity within is hidden from the outside world, and may not be easily transferred from the environment by the participants.

n. Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it’s closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.

n. A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.

With respect to education, Utah Valley University student Tyrel Kelsey describes, “creepy treehouse is what a professor can create by requiring his students to interact with him on a medium other than the class room tools. [E.g.] requiring students to follow him/her on peer networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook.”

adj. Repulsiveness arising from institutional mimicry or emulation of pre-existing community-driven environments or systems.

Example: “Blackboard Sync is soooo creepy treehouse.” Marc Hugentobler

It's a very relevant conversation to consider as the education community tries to figure out how to evolve the technologies that support education in communities like Sakai and Moodle.

Nathan Pearson has been doing some very exciting conceptual work on Sakai's user experience. This is part of a larger focus on Sakai's user experience. I'm just starting to get familiar with the 2.5 release and it's amazing when I think about where Sakai was 2 years ago. The work Nathan's leading now is going to cause some jaws to drop next year.

Check out the series of 4 narrated conceptual videos:

Week 4, Week 3, Week 2, Week 1

Wonderful news this morning...

On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard’s claims. We caution that this is a NON-final action; both Blackboard and Desire2Learn will have an opportunity to comment before a final action will issue, and after that, the decision will be subject to appeals.

I spent this past week at the OSBC conference in San Francisco where intellectual property issues and discussions about Microsoft's patent position relative to their relationship with the open source community were hot topics. This news is a great step forward for the education community and for the world of software patents in general. Thanks to the SFLC and to the education community for all the thoughtful responses and documentation that have helped the USPTO come to this initial determination.

Some interesting thoughts from Fabrizio Cardinali, the CEO of Giunti Labs in this short podcast. Fabrizio talks about the HarvestRoad acquisition and how Hive fits into future trends in eLearning and into Giunti's strategy.