Higher Education Application Foundation

Read an excellent article by Brad Wheeler from Indiana University about the possibililities for Open Source in higher education by the year 2007.

This is a great article with excellent talking points about the how’s and where’s of Open Source as well as some thoughts for folks with different perspectives; university administration, foundation, etc. I have been seeing some interesting trends recently and reading Dr. Wheeler’s article really helps put them in perspective.

During my visit to Linux World Expo last week I had a chance to attend a reception held by the OSDL which was given in part to give a chance for the University affiliate members to meet in person. While there I met with Joe Little who is a systems administrator from Stanford. Joe mentioned the fact that a lot of Universities right now are busy trying to capitalize on open source in the sense of each forming labs and trying to create a critical mass at their school. This essentially goes against the nature of open source that it is supposed to be a bit more organic and not so forced. I have to agree completely and unfortunately we’re as much to blame as any other University (see the OSL).

This morning on the univ-linux list Seth Vidal mentioned that it might make sense for the higher education schools to get together:

“Has anyone here ever considered putting together a conference for sysadmins, researchers, etc of linux on college universities and research institutions? Just to get an idea of similar goals, areas of overlap, etc. If something like that were to come about what areas would be of most interest to have talks on? What time of the year would be best?” This is a fantastic idea.

Back to Dr. Wheeler’s article, there is a great quote that comes from a veteren CIO, “With open source software, how do I know that the community cooperation that works today won’t dissipate next year? The Apache Web server has the Apache Software Foundation to ensure its evolution. What is the equivalent in higher education?” Putting this together with the thoughts of Joe Little and Seth Vidal, what do we do?

I am proposing a Higher Education Application Foundation. This foundation would be focused on combining the efforts of higher education across the globe using open source methodologies for sharing and collaboration. I know for one, the OSL would be the first to participate. We need to come together as higher education to help a) learn from each other and b) leverage the tools and experiences we have all learned over the years.

So where do we start?