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Opinion
Invest Locally
A community source leader's thoughts on how to break down the barriers to open source adoption.
3/28/2007
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today. The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates. At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features. The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning. Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development. Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
Over the last
several years I've begun to pay a lot more attention to what my family eats,
and where it came from. Recently, I've become very interested in sustainable agriculture--both for
my family's health, and to make a positive contribution to the health of the
planet. I've found ways to buy more locally produced food through community supported agriculture (CSA)
organizations and community buying clubs. I've come to the conclusion that food
produced locally using sustainable agriculture practices tastes better, is
healthier, and is better for the planet. But it's also harder from a consumer
perspective. The dilemma we face is that if we choose massively industrialized
food because it's easier and appears cheaper, the money we spend goes elsewhere and
sustains that system. If we spend locally, our dollars are invested in the
local community. As more people do this, and more money flows into the local
community, the services and distribution channels will develop and make the
better choice an easier one. This will lead to more people making the choice,
more investment, better services, and … you get the idea.
The sustainable
agriculture movement is a lot like the open source software movement in higher
education today--simply replace "better food" with "better
software." Okay, it's not quite that simple, but there are a lot of
similarities. Communities like
Sakai, Kuali, uPortal, Moodle, and others are
taking advantage of a better way to build software through open source
communities. Interest in these communities is growing rapidly, certainly
outpacing the capacity of these communities to provide all services necessary
for new community members to be successful with the software. Additionally,
within these communities there are key underdeveloped or entirely missing
services that exist in other software communities (vended software) that help
users mitigate risks, particularly in production use, and ensure long-term
sustainability of the products.
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