18.1 Leading a university open source project  (Page 9/10)

3. garyschwartz - october 22nd, 2007 at 11:22 am

In response to Ken’s question: “Has your team’s involvement and leadership in Bedework had any noticeable impact on RPI (any particular part of the institution)?”:

The answer is “yes and no”.

With respect to the unit I manage, which has responsibility for many projects and services other than Bedework, it has been a little bit of a challenge to integrate the Bedework priorities, many of which are externally driven by installations at other universities, into our overall priorities. At RPI this has resulted, to a certain degree, in an instance of the shoemaker’s children going without shoes. It has been hard to find the time to deploy our own Bedework releases in production for our own users in a timely fashion.

Additionally, not everyone in our unit is a Bedework contributor. In that context it is important that Bedework not appear to be our favored or most important project. I can see how it might appear that way from time to time.

I am not sure that our experience with Bedework has had much impact on what we might call RPI’s “institutional courage” to run open source software. We have the courage to run Bedework as our public events calendaring system, perhaps the courage to run an open source LMS such as Sakai instead of Blackboard, but not yet the courage to countenance even the thought of running Kuali, although we have the courage to run Banner on Linux, an open source OS.

In December 2006, the Bedework project was honored with a $50,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration (MATC)(see (External Link) . This was significant in a couple of ways – as a very gratifying validation of the work we had done with Bedework, and it was the first award of any kind that our university had received from Mellon. Not surprisingly, the university is interested in parlaying this award into a larger relationship with Mellon, if possible.

Even though Bedework is RPI’s public events calendar, many people on our campus do not know that nor do they care. So the 15 minutes of fame and minor celebrity that Bedework afforded us was lost on them. Additionally, in a research university context, a $50,000 grant is a very small grant. At the provost level, I think there was some confusion about the fuss being made over $50,000, and I can understand why.

We had a similar disconnect when we were directed to speak with one of our vice provosts to discuss calendaring He was more interested in discussing a student developed calendaring widget, and suggested we ask them for their guidance.

RPI recently established the Rensselaer Center for Open Software (http://undergrad.rpi.edu/update.do). We do not really have any significant contact with this group nor do they look to us as experts or even people of interest concerning open source.

In some respects, this is not terribly surprising. The faculty and students are the soul of the university. It is their accomplishments, not those of the staff, that truly bring distinction to the university. Like Jerry Lewis before us, Bedework is more appreciated abroad than at home.