e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

  • Community Source Is Dead

    As Phil noted in yesterday’s post, Kuali is moving to a for-profit model, and it looks like it is motivated more by sustainability pressures than by some grand affirmative vision for the organization. There has been a long-term debate in higher education about the value of “community source,” which is a particular governance and funding model for open source projects. This debate is arguably one of the reasons why Indiana University left the Sakai Foundation (as I will get into later in this post). At the moment, Kuali is easily the most high-profile and well-funded project that still identifies itself as Community Source. The fact that this project, led by the single most vocal proponent for the Community Source model, is moving to a different model strongly suggests that Community Source has failed.

    It’s worth taking some time to talk about why it has failed, because the story has implications for a wide range of open-licensed educational projects. For example, it is very relevant to my recent post on business models for Open Educational Resources (OER).

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  • Mellon Foundation RIT Project Concludes a Success

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. Apologies to Jim; this has been sitting in my inbox for a couple of weeks now.

    “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is closing a grant program that financed a series of high-profile university software projects, leaving some worried about a vacuum of support for open-source ventures.”

    – Marc Parry, “In Potential Blow to Open-Source Software, Mellon Foundation Closes Grant Program,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 January 2010

    A closer analysis suggests the Mellon Foundation’s “Research in Information Technology” had already met its objectives. This announcement should be an opportunity for reflection and appreciation of what was accomplished.

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  • A Brief Word about the Mellon Foundation and Sakai

    Update: Sakai Executive Korcuska has a more detailed blog post about what the Mellon Foundation is actually doing and the impact (or lack thereof) on Sakai.

    There’s been a fair bit of hand wringing online about today’s piece in the Chronicle indicating that the Mellon Foundation will be “eliminating” it’s Research in Information Technology grant program “as a stand-alone entity.” Chronicle writer Marc Perry has positioned this as a “potential blow to open source software.” It’s not terribly surprising that Mellon, like many foundations, is forced to trim and focus its grant giving in this tough economic environment. As is noted in the article (but buried halfway down after a few paragraphs of somewhat breathless reporting), Mellon is not planning to stop giving money for the development of open source educational software altogether. They are reorganizing and trimming, but not stopping.

    Perhaps more importantly for the Sakai community and the Sakai-curious, Sakai has not received Mellon funding (to my knowledge) for a few years now and is not dependent on it. So this announcement, while unfortunate, has no impact on Sakai’s development or its future.