In just two short years, the Sakai Project has imperfectly demonstrated the immense potential of the community source model for higher education. We have learned how to pool our resources, run an effective governance, deliver on date-driven development, grow an international community of both not-for-profits and commercial interests, develop a sustainability plan with US$1M cash flow, and most importantly, implement the resulting software at enterprise scale in full production environments. Sakai is providing a unifying community for rapid innovation to support e-learning, e-research, digital libraries and collaboration, but much, much work remains to be done. This session will explain the Sakai Project’s recent history, its future in the hands of the Sakai Foundation, applicability of community source to administrative systems, and assess Sakai’s local impact through implementation at Indiana University.
The terms "open source" and "community" mean different things to different audiences, and many projects assert they are open source based on a community, but exactly what is the nature that community? This session examines how differing licensing approaches (e.g. GPL, Apache, BSD, ECL, etc) define the nature of a software community. We will discuss the vary difficult choices associated with executing a viable strategy based on licensing choices. Recommended reading: Of Birkenstocks and Wingtips: Open Source Licenses by Paul B Gandel and Bradley C Wheeler. Educause Review, January-February 2005, pp10-11.
Dr. Bradley C. Wheeler is the Indiana University Associate
Vice President for Community Source Initiatives and Dean of IT for IU-Bloomington
in the Office of the Vice President for IT & CIO. He serves in leadership
roles for over $16M of shared university investments in open source software
and serves on the board of the Sakai Foundation and chairs the Kuai Project
Board. As an Associate Professor of Information Systems at IU's Kelley School
of Business, he teaches MBA courses in Executive Leadership of IT Strategy,
and has taught e-business and e-learning courses for corporate/academic audiences
in 26 countries on six continents.
