18.1 Leading a university open source project  (Page 7/10)

Like Virginia Lee Burton’s Mike Mulligan, who had always said that Mary Anne, his steam shovel, “…could dig as much in a day as a hundred men could dig in a week but he had never quite sure this was true,” we had not been quite sure that our claims of Bedework’s agnosticisms were as true as we intended. Over the last 18 months, the Bedework community have helped us understand where some of these objectives had not been fully realized, and in some cases, have worked with us to make the claims “more true.”

Higher ed aware

We now refer to Bedework as “a calendar system for higher education” rather than as an “institutional calendar,” so it no longer sounds like it is a product for correctional facilities.

Emphasis on higher ed does not preclude other uses for Bedework, but it does mean we are cognizant of the needs and constraints of higher ed. Bedework has no licensing fees or other costs, no restrictions on usage or deployment, distributed, fine-grained administration, standards compliance, a public events component, JSR168 portal “friendliness,” and flexible authentication and access control, and the working assumption that Bedework be one of many different calendaring systems on campus.

On the other hand, there are other higher ed needs that Bedework does not yet easily accommodate, such as displaying building and facilities hours, or scheduling faculty office hours. Serge Goldstein at Princeton has written a very sophisticated office hours application that helped me appreciate the complexities and intricacies of addressing this issue.

We’re only in it for … the money?

We have gotten deeply involved, much more deeply, in Bedework than we anticipated when we started collaborating with Washington more than four years ago. However, our overall focus remains delivering value locally (to the RPI community) while at the same time making Bedework attractive enough to other universities that they would adopt the software and contribute to its development.

Earlier I stated that we view our open software work as the confluence of enlightened self-interest and altruism. The self-interest was to provide our university with a public events calendaring system, which we have done. Perhaps it was all enlightened self interest, however.

However, what we have gotten out of this project has transcended the calendaring system itself. Bedework and our participation in CalConnect has reconnected us the larger world and community of university software development.

Our open software project has allowed us meet, collaborate, and be influenced by so many talented people in higher ed around the world, an opportunity that probably would not have come our way if we had not engaged in an open software project. It is an opportunity to show the same kindness to others that the University of Washington showed us by welcoming us into their UWCalendar open software project.

It is an opportunity to continue the tradition of open software development of contributing according to our ability. It is an opportunity to reconnect with our own university by hiring a student to work with us on this project.