Community Source Makes Good Sense | From the Bell Tower
Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA -- Library Journal, 7/2/2009
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The open source movement has transformed the way we think about software and our systems. You may be well informed about open source, but what about community source? I didn’t know anything about it until I heard a presentation by Jennifer Foutty from the Kuali Foundation. Well, that’s not exactly true. I did know about community source software, I just didn’t know that’s what it was called.
It was valuable to gain a better understanding of what the Kuali Foundation does, and how it supports the development of community source software. Why? Because Kuali is managing one of the biggest undertakings to revolutionize the way academic libraries operate. The Open Library Environment (OLE) is an ambitious project to develop an open integrated library system (ILS) that would be freely available to any academic institution.
A few big projects
The Kuali Foundation is not a vendor. Rather it is a consortia of higher education institutions that came together to develop an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Kuali manages only a limited number of projects, but they represent the development of open source software code for some of the most significant software products used by colleges and universities.
The project most familiar to academic librarians is Sakai, an open source course management software system designed to offer an option to Blackboard and its competitors. Kuali began with a grant from the Mellon Foundation but it now obtains funds from a variety of higher education sources.
Why community source?
The process behind open source is fairly simple. One individual or organization comes up with software for which the development code is available to anyone. It may be freely used by others, and there is a general understanding that those who use it will also contribute to developing new and better versions of the software.
In comparison, community source code is more restricted. Only partners who are community members may develop the software. That is the primary way potential users can know who worked on the product. That helps to ensure reliability and confidence in the project—very important with such mission critical software.
Another key difference is that Kuali owns the intellectual property for all its software products. Creating software on this scope involves tax and compliance implications, and Kuali, as a nonprofit, is equipped to manage this for the community participants.
Finally, Kuali can provide a governance structure for the collaborating institutions. Through its oversight of the project, Kuali gives each institutional member a seat at the decision-making table. This ensures no one institution will strong-arm the others or attempt to take over the project.
I asked Foutty what she saw as the advantages of community source projects. “Community source is a method of developing software that allows institutions to pool their resources, and produce systems that are built by higher education, for higher education,” she says. “The community source software is delivered without any licensing costs. Beyond the issues of reduced cost and controlling their own destiny, these partners in the community source model find that because there is collaboration from many institutions, the resulting software can often be better designed for all academia rather than constrained to a particular institution’s history.”
Kuali helps OLE take shape
The goal with OLE is to create an ILS that is more flexible and efficient than any offered by current commercial vendors. It will also be designed to have greater interoperability with institutional ERP software. OLE will likely bypass the discovery module since numerous options already exist. There are currently about a dozen academic institutions partnering on OLE.
With support from Kuali, the OLE project now has a governance structure to provide the framework for future development. To date, the OLE members are mostly involved in the planning stages as they explore the use of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to build this next generation ILS.
One thing I did learn about OLE is that open source software, especially community source projects like those led by Kuali, are far from free. The participating members have made a substantial financial commitment to the development of OLE. A project of this size and scope will take more than money, though. As past experience in higher education has shown, these large-scale projects require structure, governance, and attention to process.
That is why OLE has teamed up with Kuali. Though quite a few years will pass before OLE comes to fruition, this is an exciting project that academic librarians will closely watch as, less obvious to us all, Kuali works in the background to keep the project moving forward.
Steven Bell is Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. For more from Steven visit his blogs, Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog and Designing Better Libraries or visit his web site.
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