[Educause 2004] Open source is all the rage

It seems like the theme, intentional or otherwise, of this conference is the increased visibility and progress on open source projects in higher ed.

Brad Wheeler from Indiana gave a heavily attended talk where he spoke about the process by which Indiana came to the conclusion that it's better in many (though not all) instances to collaborate with other like-minded institutions on developing software than to either purchase it from major vendors or build it themselves.

Dave Lambert from Georgetown spoke about the general software dilemma faced by higher ed institutions - where we can't afford to build all of our own applications but the vendors don't meet all our requirements so force us to either heavily modify code or build workarounds. He emerging consolidations and the depressed investment climate are causing new uncertainties in the commercial vendor space. He contrasted that with the strengths of open source projects. He did suggest that it's possible that higher ed needs a new organization to coordinate and provide a locus for fostering and sustaining the many open source projects in progress. He painted a nice picture of topics which clump together into something he calls Scholarly Information Systems, where he said that it makes sense for campuses to collaborate on projects.

I met in the afternoon with Brad Wheeler and Rob Lownden and some other folks to talk about the new Kuali project to build an open source Financial Information System. The core partners in this project at present are Indiana and the University of Hawaii. This project sounds like it's taking off, and it's one I predict we'll be hearing lots more about.

This morning I participated with Mitch Kapor, Jack McCredie and Lisa Dusseault on a panel about the Chandler Project. The significant news here is that Mitch actually gave a demo of the 0.4 release of the software! Huzzah! He managed to create a collection of calendar items, upload them to a WebDAV server, tell the client to share them with another user, communicate the sharing invitation by email, and (on the other client) receive the invitation and accept the items into the second client's calendar. That's progress! 0.4 is scheduled for public release next week.