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By becoming a development partner in
community source, the institution can influence the
application features, complete the deployment
sooner, minimize the total cost of ownership, and
reduce the uncertainty of the system value. This
incentive is the main driving force for institutions to
make community source projects succeed. The
motivation for institution joining in community
source development will be further explained in the
Kuali case section.
It is worthwhile to study community source since
it offers an innovative way to develop enterprise
applications and it can potentially break the
dominance of commercial software in enterprise
applications.
This paper is structured as follows: we start with
introducing a real world community source project
to help better understand the community source
approach. Then we outline the related research
directions under the technological, the economic and
the managerial perspective respectively and discuss
the potential research opportunities. We present the
future trend of community source and the value of
research in community source in the discussion
section. The long term objectives for community
source research are pointed out at the end of this
paper.
2 THE KUALI CASE
In order to better understand community source, we
studied a real-world ongoing community source
project of called Kuali (www.kuali.org). The Kuali
case offered us a great opportunity to study the
research issues of community source in a higher
education setting.
Kuali is a consortium of universities to develop
an open source financial service system, starting
with the conversion of the Indiana University’s
Financial Information System to the web in 2004
(www.kuali.org). The original motivation of the
project is that existing financial systems used in the
universities are outdated and too difficult to
maintain. The commercial products are often too
expensive and hard to customize; some institutions
paid tens of millions to ERP vendors for software
and installation, but still need to build 15% of all the
features they need to handle specific financial
transaction needs. Some schools and colleges found
that they need to operate expensive "shadow
systems" to provide needed features that are absent
in currently available ERP packages. The
alternatives to buying off-the-shelf packaged
financial software are equally daunting and can only
be considered by the largest institutions. The Kuali
project provides an attractive alternative to the “buy
or build” dilemma. It pools institutional resources to
develop an open source financial system, thus
dramatically reducing the cost of managing fiscal
data and processes in higher education.
The initial mission of the Kuali consortium was
to develop a baseline system for financial services
and has now expanded to other systems such as
research administration and student management.
Currently, there are three main application modules
in Kuali: the Kuali Financial Services (KFS), the
Kuali Research Administration (KRA), and the
Kuali Student System (KS). The KFS project was
just completed. The KRA and KS project are
scheduled to be released after 2010.
The Indiana University and the University of
Hawaii started to lead the effort to build KFS in
2004. In March, 2005, Kuali project got a start-up
grant $2.5M from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. The follow-up funding was invested
from participating institutions which are referred as
the development partners of KFS. KFS project is
mainly funded by its partner institutions. In April
2006, Kuali project announced the availability of the
Kuali Test Drive, which enables institutions to
explore KFS. In October, 2006, Kuali foundation
released KFS phase I. KFS Phase II was released in
July 2008. KFS project was completed in 2010 and
have grown to around thirty development partners
including Carnegie Mellon University, Cornel
University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
the University of Arizona, and University of
California. One of the very important components of
the Kuali effort is the Kuali Commercial Affiliates
program. Commercial Affiliates provide for fee
guidance, support, implementation, and integration
services related to the Kuali software. Affiliates may
offer packaged versions of Kuali that provide value
for installation or integration beyond the basic Kuali
software. Affiliates may also offer other types of
training, documentation, or hosting services.
The development team in community source is
under a formal organizational structure. Figure 1
shows the complexity of the organization structure.
The development partners work in a project
organization. The Kuali Board is the final decision
maker during the development of Kuali. The Kuali
functional council and Kuali technical council take
care of the functional issues and technical issues of
Kuali, respectively. The Extended board, Kuali
investors, Kuali functional council, Kuali technical
council and the project manager report to the Kuali
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