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.

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'm in Chicago for the sixth Kuali Days event this week. It's a gathering of the Kuali communities and an opportunity for newcomers to learn about Kuali Financial System, Research Administration, Student, Rice, and more. While anyone can download the Kuali software from the website, or get a pre-configured appliance to evaluate the software, Kuali Days is the only real opportunity to get a first hand sense for what's going on. Kuali, like Sakai, is much more than just software. There's a tremendous opportunity for peer collaboration. It's a professional development event as much as anything and there's no substitute for being here.

This morning I read Joseph Panettieri's article called "Is Open Source the ERP Cure-All?" in Campus Technology. It deals most directly with open source as an alternative to proprietary systems but it goes beyond that to talk about 3 sourcing options: Traditional on-premise, SaaS (hosted applications), and Open Source. I think there's a risk in talking about these three as alternatives because it's mixing apples and oranges a bit. On-Premise and SaaS (On-Demand) are two different ways to acquire/deploy/pay for software. Proprietary and Open Source are two different methods for developing and licensing software. Clarity here is important as there are still many misconceptions. One thing you might miss if you think of these things as "alternatives" is the importance of open source in the delivery of SaaS solutions, for example.

I appreciate how much Joseph and Campus Technology pay attention and inform our community about these important developments.

The Kuali Foundation announced that Jennifer Foutty has been selected as the Foundation's first Executive Director. This is an important step for the Kuali community. Up to this point any strategic planning, or executioin of specific initiatives has been undertaken by individual board members or other community leaders during "spare time." A lot has been accomplished this way already, but this step represents a whole new phase of evolution for the community.

I don't know Jennifer very well but I have worked extensively with most of the search committee and trust their judgement. I'm very excited for the community and look forward to working with Jennifer in this next phase of the Kuali community.

There's a great article in the December issue of the NACUBO Business Officer magazine about the impact an enterprise workflow system can have on student (customer) service.

The story is centered on two before and after scenarios at the University of Connecticut (UCONN) where enterprise workflow software transformed a troublesome process on campus. In the first they used Lotus Domino to transform a graduate assistance payroll process from a two week nightmare, to a straightforward 24 hour process. In the second scenario UCONN transformed the completion of the dependent tuition waiver for children of university employees using Kuali Enterprise Workflow (KEW) software. The following quote from the article sums up the results nicely:

Converting our dependent tuition waiver via KEW made our previous paper process seem almost embarrassing.

One really neat thing about this story is that UCONN used open source software developed by the Kuali community to dramatically improve service to their users. Kuali is a community of institutions and commercial organizations working together using open source methods to develop and license enterprise software for education. Because the software is available under an open source license, UCONN was able to download it and immediately benefit from it without restriction.

An important effect of the open source model is that people often find and use software in ways not originally contemplated by the creators. This is largely because the software and source code are available to anyone without licensing restrictions. The KEW software that UCONN is using was originally a part of the Kuali Financial System (KFS). Several of the founders of the Kuali project working on the Financial System saw a lot of value in the embedded workflow engine independent of the financial system. As a result, the engine was decoupled so that it could be used independently. This is a real benefit over the proprietary model where a discovery like this wouldn't necessarily occur. And if the discovery did occur, licensing restrictions and the complexity of monetizing the decoupled component might prevent it from being released.

The software industry in education is undergoing a transformation. Increasingly the best software is being developed as a multi-organization community using open source methods and open source licensing. While much of the current generation of proprietary software will be replaced by new open source alternatives, there's a vital role for commercial organizations to play in the emergent software ecosystem. rSmart (my company), for example, is one of the founders of the Kuali project and enables widespread adoption and use by providing the services and support that many institutions need. I'm proud to say that we're in good company among exemplars like IBM and Sun.

Early adopters like UCONN are playing a vital role in projects like Kuali by demonstrating successful outcomes like the ones in the NACUBO article. I'm grateful they took the time to share the information and educate others.

I just read an interesting article called Google’s Lunchtime Betting Game in the NY Times online. It's about the results of an experiment performed with Google employees. Google has been using a betting game to aggregate many employees' intelligence on a particular topic. In the game employees can accumulate Goobles and win prizes.

One of the interesting conclusions is more about the flow of information in an organization. It found (not surprisingly) that information is shared most easily and effectively between people who work close to one another.

This is tangible evidence, the authors argue, that information is shared most easily and effectively among office neighbors, even at an Internet company where instant messaging and e-mail are generally preferred to face-to-face discussion.

At rSmart, and in the Sakai and Kuali open source communities I'm a part of, I often work virtually with others who aren't in the same building, and often aren't even in the same organization. While the tools & technology for being connected are better than ever, my own experience certainly backs up the conclusion.

I'm also curious about the potential use of prediction markets among members of an open source community to deal with the complexity of software product planning and collective decision-making.

According to Trace Urdan, in the latest Education Signals...

Sakai adoption is not meaningfully hampered by usability issues, but by obstacles to the risk/rewards of an open source solution to begin with. Wider Sakai adoption, we think, is more likely to come about by increased activity among its commercial supporters than by tweaks to the platform itself.

Trace and team are reacting to Michael Feldstein's post from September...

I'm so close to the software as a user that I place a lot of importance on improving the user experience. As a member of the Sakai community, I see this as a very important priority for our collective energy. So much so, that I have donated some time and energy recruiting others willing to contribute to the improvement initiative, and I've committed some funding for it.

At the same time, I agree wholeheartedly with Trace. I speak with a lot of people about adopting Sakai, Kuali, and open source in general and perceived lack of support is the #1 concern.

It's not surprising that Actuate's 2007 survey of enterprise adoption of open source points to this perception as a key barrier to open source adoption. I just downloaded the full report but found Matt Asay's summary helpful this morning and I plan on digging into the rest of the report soon.