ItlcMeetingFeb2004 - Raymond Yee's Wiki

I'm at the

ITLC Feb 2004 meeting. The focus topic is OpenSource.

Walt Scacchi

Presentation: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/Presentations/OSS-Strategies/

sample paper: Understanding Open Source Software Evolution

FreeSoftware is not the same as OpenSource.

* F/OSSD involves more software development tools, Web resources, and personal computing resources than traditional methods.

Investors

large corporations: IBM: EclipseProject, Sun: OpenOfficeOrg, Microsoft: Rotor
other types of organziations

CIO 2002-2003:

OSS primarily for new system deployments
OSS beneftis: lower TCO, lower capital investment, greater reliability
OSS weaknesses: lack of in-house skils or in labor market; lack of vendor support; switching costs

Findings from studies:

Hars and Ou, 2002 -- developers work on multiple projeccts (>60%)
Madey, et al. 2003 -- power law (5% sustainability 4000/80000 of Sourceforge)
Nichols and Twidale, 2003: usability of F/OSS systems generally neglected
Scacchi 2002-2004: largest F/OSSD projects sustain exponential growth; most F/OSSD projects fail to grow to any sustainable effort. (unprecedented exp. growth for the few projects)

Reference -- something like http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/Presentations/OSS_Strategies/

Process for F/OSS Requirements (Scacchi 2002)

F/OSS Requirements/Designs

not explicit
not formal

F/OSS requirements/designs are embedded within "informalisms"

examples: threaded email discussion lists, web sites, FAQs....

Project management and career development (Scacchi 2004)

F/OSSD projects self-organize as a pyramid meritocracy visa virtual project management

meritocracies embrace incremental mutations over radical innovations
VPM requires people to act in leadership roles based on skill, availability, and belief in project community

F/OSS developers want to have fun, exercise their technical skill, try out new kinds of systems to develop, and/or interconnect multiple F/OSSD projects (freedom of choice and expression)

The products don't tell us about open source processes -- we can do better with the processes.

Processes

closed source process are opaque -- and subject to changes by vendors
open source processes: enables continuous process improvement and organizational learning

Strategies for Developing and Deploying F/OSS

requirements and design artifact sharing

emergent, continuously evolving
structured vs. semi-structured vs ad hoc

cost information/analysis sharing

determine "business value" of F/OSS efforts

community and career development

join/form F/OSSD consortia
enhance local skill base
encourage community ownership over individual contribution/fault

open source processes:

F/OSS systems analysis and design
deployment and support of F/OSS systems
usability capture and feedback
organizational transformation

simulate/facilitate UC-based research into F/OSSD through partnerships

ISR
Center for Research in ....???

Open university opportunities -- would be good to follow up hear

Ron Yanosky

Ron Yanosky bio at Gartner

Open Source for Higher Education E-Learning: Status Report, Problems, and Potential

the current big problem is managing vendors -- maybe there are ways to work around vendors or at least encourage vendors to work more within the values of higher education
focus of talk is on e-learning

The University: Cathedral or Bazaar? (a la EricRaymond) -- a bit of both and maybe neither exactly

Why OSS in higher ed?

tight budgets
rising vendor lock-in (vendors looking for new market opportunities -- inadvertent or purposeful lock-in)
academic culture
geopolitical pressure
OSS options increasing

Movement of OSS usage from infrastructure to applications, including portals and e-learning -- upsurge of usage of OpenSource in universities.

72% commercial marketshare for CMS -- institutions > 2000 students -- pretty-well broken up between Blackboard and WebCT (source: Gartner E-Learning Surveys, 2001-2003)

Beyond Course Management

an increasing awareness of the need for more sophisticated learning content development tools, including library management

Gartner prediction: Type A institutions will experiment with open-source solutions (0.8 probability)

mention of projects I've never heard of or need reminding of: Bodington, ILIAS, Fle3

Recommendations

track ongoing developments for decisions in 2005-2007 timeframe
look at internal support capabilities for OSS worst cases
use Linxu as a "competitive negotiating weapon"
used open-source products as a less risky and more viable option to internally developed applications
refine your open-source adoption attitude in different deployment contexts

Lois Brooks

Lois Brooks is talking about the SakaiProject.

CourseWork funding expires, administrators explore alternatives CourseWork is the Stanford LMS.

SakaiProject is concept/architecture/working software/community

Concept: open standards/best practices -> interoperability -> sharing

SakaiProject/ToolPortabilityProfile: "a clear standard for writing tools that can extend the core set of educational applications"

OKI OSIDS, JSR-168 portlet spec, and a user interface abstraction
describes a common path forward

Products:

a complete CMS w/ sophisticated assessment tools
enterprise services based portal
workflow engine
research support collaboration system

"There is no Plan B. This is our NextGenCMS."

At Stanford -- library and academic computing report up to the same leader.

Timeline

TPP Feb 27, 2004
Functional Specification March 30, 2004
1st Developer Workshop June 2004
....

Victor Edmunds

At Long Beach, there was a kickoff for UC directors of instructional technologies.

Question: What is LOLA?

Dan Greenstein

DanGreenstein of the CaliforniaDigitalLibrary

deep resource sharing

resource-sharing imperatives
strategies
place of OpenSource

Resource

unsustainable economics of scholarly communications -- rise of journal prices
number of monographs increasing
explosion in the volume of information distributed exclusively in digital form
constantly escalating user expectations and demands driven

by the information industry
the dynamics of inter-institutional competition

Library strategic response

pool systemwide and campus library resources to afford enhancement and innovation that campus libraries required but cannot afford independently, notably in the development systemwide

collections
services
supporting infrastructure (capital and technical)

Models of service models

central
layered
distributed

CDL has perpetual access clauses for commercial materials -- but needs to produce an architecture to actually archive the materials. CDL also wants to archive parts of the Web for various research purposes.

Panel discussion

JackMcCredie is talking about the ChandlerProject.

David Walker is talking about ShibbolethSpec and its pilot roll-outs at UC. There's a mention of InCommon (see, for example, http://conference.digitalidworld.com/2003/attendees/slides/GMesaD10161600.ppt)

Brainstorming ideas

Some of this work will be of interest to the NSF. Partnering with home UC institutes to get external funding.
Open university ideas
capturing current best practices throughout UC system.
how to incent people to use OpenSource tools like OpenOfficeOrg
finding problems of common interest to solve across the campuses