Kuali Coma Workshop 2015 April 6, 2015 Filed under: ERP, Kuali and tagged with: 2015, KCW, Kuali, KualiCo, Sound of Music Back in August 2014, I first posted a blog on the commercial path Kuali began, resulting in what we now know as KualiCo. Since that time, there have been many posts which have commented on Kuali and pointed out the obvious doublespeak used by those in positions of authority, i.e., the Kuali Foundation Board members. As noted in that first post, I literally had the paperwork on my desk to pay my institutional rental fee for the privilege of providing input on the gated open source efforts known as Kuali (hmmm.paying rent so that I can have an opinion seems a bit crazy now). One thing this payment would have allowed is the privilege of attending and providing input at the annual Kuali Community Workshop (KCW). KCW is traditionally touted as an annual opportunity, for members of the community who are partners in the various projects, to gather for face-to-face workshops, meetings, and discussions. The foundation has been aggressively advertising this year s KCW which will be held in Atlanta later this month. Is the Foundation counting on some excitement factor occurring which builds a renewed interest for people to attend this year s KCW? Let s examine that possibility: More than one statement has been made about KualiCo focusing on the Curriculum Management module of the new KS. As I said in a previous blog, my prediction is that they will get out a prototype by their projected July 2015 date and they will want to party with your ERP like it is 1998. That release will generate a much greater need to finance further development. Meanwhile, I am also hearing that Workday has allocated more than $40 million to its Student product and is already delivering some usable components to its design partner universities such as Yale. The Workday effort moving From blog.kentbrooks.com/?p=2585 1 7 April 2015
forward with very deep pockets drastically increases the pressure on an underfunded KualiCo to get some working code off the ground by their July deadline. Lets quickly compare some selected sections of the publicly available KCW agendas from 2013, 2014 and 2015 KCW 2013 From blog.kentbrooks.com/?p=2585 2 7 April 2015
KCW 2014 From blog.kentbrooks.com/?p=2585 3 7 April 2015
KCW 2015 From blog.kentbrooks.com/?p=2585 4 7 April 2015
With the products mentioned in the 2014 program, here is their 2015 status of those projects as of this post: KS (Student): $40 million down the tubes [mfeldstein.com/kuali-studentsunsetting-40-million-project-moving-kualico/] KFS (Kuali Financial System) and KC (Kuali Coeus): The bare minimum is being done today which is probably the wrap-up of what those project teams had accomplished prior to commercialization of Kuali. The interesting part is that the Kuali Foundation, in their information document published indicated and I quote In 3-5 years, KualiCo will begin re-writing Finance and Research with a more modern, scalable, and flexible software stack. So, basically KFS and KC for the most part will not change much at all. Also, I really doubt that KualiCo will be around long enough to re-write those modules. KHR (The HR project): Abandoned OLE (The library project): No recent activity reported on the Foundation front and maybe the investor institutions will continue on their own. Rice: Minimum upkeep but it was announced that it will be eliminated with the new technology direction of KualiCo. The Rice investor institutions must be worried more investment money down the tubes. UXI: Seems to have been abandoned I guess that is what happens when a community falls into a coma. So what will they talk about at the KCW? : ) I have been contacted by many people over the past several months since writing that first post on this topic. Most recently people are wondering what the board wants to accomplish at such a meeting. One person said that these workshops used to be a nice forum for the donated developers from their university along with other developers and functional people from other institutions. They used to get together face to face and review progress, plan, and update the product roadmaps. After the commercialization, the contributed developers were returned to those universities. Why? well the Foundation doesn t want developers anymore, the Foundation needs cash instead to finance KualiCo. I think these KCW meetings are still being advertised so that the Foundation can finance the face-to-face meetings of all the KualiCo developers. I think the Kuali Foundation is desperate to show institutions that there still is an active Kuali community, and to try to convince them that nothing has fundamentally changed with Kuali. Remember in The Sound of Music, after the Germans had taken over Austria, they allowed the Austrian national festival to go on as planned? Their stated reason was to show that nothing has changed in Austria. I also think that the KualiCo people need to demonstrate strongly that they aren t just after money (even though they are), and so they continue to put on the KCW act. This is similar to the two community From blog.kentbrooks.com/?p=2585 5 7 April 2015
meetings in the summer of 2014 which many feel were leveraged to argue that it was the community, not a few board members, who had decided to form the for-profit company. The only thing I am sure of from these conversations is that the Foundation board has succeeded in alienating and angering a once passionate community while also putting a black mark on open source efforts in general. If you do believe that progress on most of the Kuali projects has gone into a coma as mentioned above, maybe the acronym KCW now means Kuali Coma Workshop or maybe if it is a time to gather and fellowship while waiting for the July milestone maybe it could be called the Kuali Cocktail Workshop. At any rate, in these difficult financial times I would be hard pressed to justify the expenditure to enter the gate as well as the travel to a community meeting for a community that is by most accounts in a coma. Here is the big picture Although there has been some commercial effort to establish a new community I don t think institutions are comfortable with a commercially led effort on this front. I would not be surprised if product-specific consortiums similar to what many know as special interests groups (SIGs) form for Rice and other products. Project investor institutions will realize more and more that their investment dollars intended to support a community development effort have been ultimately wasted as those dollars have been diverted to the establishment and continuation of KualiCo. I have talked to many who feel they were bullied by the Foundation board throughout the transition process and they are no longer getting any value for their investments. They may ultimately realize that they would be better off sustaining and enhancing those products of interest on their own and having some control over their destiny. (115) Written by kentbrooks Kent Brooks is the IT Director at Casper College in Casper Wyoming, is a blogger on various technology topics for his own blog KentBrooks.com, a contributor to MoodleNews, and Wes Fryers Internationally acclaimed "Speed of Creativity" blog. He served as Chief Technology Officer/ Dean /Computer Coordinator at Higher Education Institutions in Oklahoma and New Mexico for nearly 20 years. While in New Mexico he was actively involved in the Los Alamos National Laboratory EDUNET program which sought to bring telecommunications technologies to the four corners area of the US. Kent has been heavily involved in numerous teacher-training projects and efforts to bring networking and telecommunications technologies to rural areas. His grant writing efforts have brought over $50 million dollars to equip rural schools, tribal complexes and museums across the US with distance learning technologies. Kent's work interests include the acquisition of technology and training resources for rural under served communities. More specifically his work interest and focus is on the "open" or "free" software movement and its impact on delivery of technological services in education. From blog.kentbrooks.com/?p=2585 6 7 April 2015