We are at the beginning of a remarkable period in human history. We are entering a web 2.0 world - a world where networked communities inform decisions on both the individual and societal level. These networked communities involve a significant amount of discussion. This posting is made in that spirit. The purpose is not to provide answers but to raise questions. And thus, each paragraph is a series of questions. I have opened each paragraph with a framing question. The questions that follow are meant to further expose the underlying issues. Again, the purpose is to inspire discussion.

Background

What is the role of university faculty in society?

The traditional role of university faculty has been to advance the knowledge bases within their respective disciplines. Essentially, a faculty member’s responsibility to the academy is to think. In the United States and much of the western world, university faculty are given lifetime appointments (tenure), so they can advance the knowledge base in society without fear of reprisal for non-traditional or controversial ideas. Tenure also allows faculty to think generationally rather than short term. Finally, tenure also allows faculty to develop ideas based on pure thought rather than for commercial gain.

Discussion

What is the relationship between university faculty and intellectual property rights?

If the role of faculty is to produce knowledge, do faculty have a right to the protection of their intellectual property? Does that intellectual property belong to the university or government agency or corporation who supports the faculty member’s position? How is this relationship different in different parts of the world?

In what ways does OER impact the relationship between university faculty and their intellectual property rights? Because of its open nature, does the OER community demand that the university faculty member give up their intellectual property and place their creations into the open space? If not, does OER demand that the university faculty member give up part of their intellectual property rights? If so, which part? The paragraphs below explore some of the options.

Attribution

Should the work of a faculty member be attributed to the faculty member?

What role does society play in the development of the knowledge-base? If we are truly moving into a web 2.0 world where society contributes to the knowledge-base on a mass scale, how much attribution is required for any one individual? By the same token, do users have the right to know who created or contributed to the body of work in order to vet or filter the information? If the goal is to advance the knowledge-base as quickly as possible, isn’t it necessary to have attribution in order to separate the quality material from that of lesser relevance? If filters like attribution are applied, doesn’t that cause the reinforcement of the status quo and cause the degradation of innovative ways of think or looking at a problem from a completely different perspective? Because in many parts of the world it is expected that faculty members will go out and work on projects outside the university in order to pay their salaries, is it more or less important that attribution be a part of the retained right when work is put into the OER space?

Non-commercial

Should others be allowed to make a profit from the work of university faculty?

If a faculty member is paid to think, should a faculty member be allowed to make additional income from work that they are already paid to do? If so, doesn’t that give the faculty member an unfair market advantage over the non-academic in the field who does not have the benefit of the safety net of tenure and university? If people are not allowed to reap the rewards of their efforts why would the best and smartest of the human race become university faculty? Can we truly count on the fact that there are enough altruists in the world who are willing to work below market wage? Is the lifetime contract of tenure a fair exchange for the income that could be earned in the commercial sector? If it is true that most faculty could not make more money in the commercial sector, should a distinction be made among those who can and cannot make a great wage outside the academy?

Should others be allowed to make a profit from the work of university faculty? If the commercial sector is not allowed to commoditize the work – or in other terms, turn the theory into application –, are we as society deprived of the benefits of the work of university faculty? If the commercial sector is prevented from participating in this portion of the knowledge sector, is society potentially deprived of the brainpower of a significantly large portion of the population who are, in many ways, contributing to the advancement of the knowledge base of society? Because in many parts of the world it is expected that faculty members will go out and work on projects outside the university in order to pay their salaries, is it more or less important that the work be made non-commercial in the OER space?

Non-derivative

Should derivative works be allowed on the work of university faculty?

Is the work of university faculty different in some way as to justify protection from others preparing derivative works? If yes, isn’t it taking this arguably more well thought out knowledge out of the web 2.0 process where the power of the network of communities can add to an already strong base? If we allow derivative works on the work of university faculty will those creating derivative work leverage the name of the faculty to advance their own ideology in ways unintended by the faculty member who initially created the work thus damaging the reputation of the faculty member who originally entered the content? Does this deter those with good reputations from putting their ideas into the marketplace for fear of having them twisted into something unintended? Does this then have a chilling effect on the creation of something truly innovative?

I look forward to your responses.

I want to welcome Joel Thierstein and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. Joel will be sharing some of his experiences and writing on the topic of “The Role Of University Faculty In The OER World,” which will provide the opportunity to open a conversation on the critical role of faculty in the ecosystem that supports the creation, distribution, use, and reuse of OER.

Dr. Joel Thierstein serves as the Associate Provost for Innovative Scholarly Communication at Rice University and Executive Director of Connexions. Prior to coming to Rice, Joel served as an Associate Professor and Director of New Media Communications at Oregon State University. He also served as a professor at Baylor University, Purdue University Calumet, and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Dr. Thierstein has also served as a visiting professor of Communications Law at Syracuse University.

Writing extensively in telecommunications, Joel’s books include Birds In Flight: Satellites In The New Millennium, 3rd ed. and Religion, Law and Freedom: A Global Perspective. In addition, to Joel’s obvious commitment to open and sustainable education, he also has served as a Board member of Fossil Rim Wildlife Center since 2000 and Board Chair since 2003, and has worked extensively with the Conservation Centers for Species Survival.

Although I was aware of Joel’s work through Connexions, I did not have the opportunity to meet him until a meeting that Wayne Mackintosh called in Vancouver about a year ago, during which we discussed the use of wikis to support development, management, and presentation of educational content. Incidentally I also first met Christine Geith and Leigh Blackall at this meeting, who have also contributed to this our Series. Unfortunately at the time, I did not have the opportunity to really speak with Joel during the meeting, so here is an opportunity for all of us to take advantage of sharing ideas about the critical topic that Joel will be outline for us. In any event, please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.

“The Business of Open Source,” the twenty first installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on April 11, 2008, by Stuart Sim. Stuart serves as the Chief Technology Officers and Chief Architect of Moodlerooms, which provides comprehensive technical support services to the Moodle course management system open source software. Thanks, Stuart, for a great posting!

In his posting, Stuart raises some of the challenges of building a business model for wrapping services around intellectual property (IP) that is open. He points out that providing services for IP that you own provides an element of control that you do not have while supporting OSS. Your success with open IP is based entirely on the value proposition of your services.

Stuart clearly communicates that there are significant benefits to providing services for OSS as well as challenges. First, working in the OSS space provides a strong impetus to innovate and manage risk. For example, code visibility provides an advantage to commercial service providers who become part of the development community, spend time understanding the code and community, and contribute to the code. It is through this type of involvement that a service provider can better refine its risk model, reduce its risk premiums, and pass them on to customers.

The “punch line” of Stuart’s posting is that transparency leads to efficiency, efficiency to lower cost, and lower cost leads to more and happier customers/users. While code transparency provides opportunities for efficiencies, the inefficiencies associated with proprietary (closed) IP come, at least in part, from the non-competitive nature of how R&D is conducted and services are provided in closed software environments. The development of comprehensive and commercial service providers such as Moodlerooms, has eliminated, for some OSS products, the problem for end users of having great low cost software, but no options for external software support. The economics of open code allows smart service organizations to provide low-cost high-value services, and smart software users to take advantage of both low or non-existent license fees, and low cost services.

Comments
There were a few more general comments about model and what factors associated with specific OSS products/communties allow for a good commercial service support model. The conversation never really gained much traction, which is unfortunate. I think that the topic is incredibly important for OSS communities as well as organizations that adopt OSS into their core business systems, and customer facing parts of their value chain. So, in a while, I am going to take another stab at this topic and see if we can get a little more teased out of it. For now, I think that Stuart has provided some nice conceptual points to hang on to, and some foundation to build from, which are very important for a dialog that is still under exploration and development. Any suggestions for authors or approaches to expand on this topic would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks again to Stuart for his interesting and insightful post and responses. I also want to extend a big thank you to Steve Foerster for adding to the post, and other folks who have been reading along. On May 1st, Joel Thierstein, who serves as the Associate Provost for Innovative Scholarly Communication at Rice University and Executive Director of Connexions will be posting on “The Role Of University Faculty In The OER World.” The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.

First off let me state the obvious and say that building a business that depends on open source is not an easy thing to do. If it was, there would a great deal more success stories out there.

Offering services around Intellectual Property (IP) you own, manage and control that no one else can replicate - or not easily any way, is a well understood model if not always executed in the best way. Grabbing hold of ‘free’ software and wrapping services in a completely transparent way means really understanding operational risk. Given that the same IP is available for anyone to do exactly the same thing and compete in your marketplace means your always fighting to innovate faster than the next guy and that can only be a good thing.

Personally, I love the idea of forcing my competitors to innovate.

The goal of course is to build a value proposition to the market that provides the highest quality of service at the lowest cost. The transparent nature of open source projects allow you to develop your own risk model where you can identify exposure and price your services competitively.

Visibility into the underlying source code is the first step. Those organizations that participate in the project community gain a much greater advantage than those listening from the outside. By contributing to the development of the code and gathering feedback from both the software users and fellow developers, a more refined risk model can be developed with lower risk premiums and therefore a greater competitive pricing model can be offered to the market.

The more obvious benefits that are more widely presented include reduced internal costs in two significant areas: research and development and support.

There are companies that invest nothing in R&D and, generally speaking, history has not been kind to them. This is especially true of software companies where very tight competition forces constant innovation. In a closed model that innovation has to be paid for by the customer and is often non-transparent so the true value is hard to assess.

The other major cost in a closed environment is the end user support where the model has to be developed and maintained internally and paid for entirely by the customer. Without the ability to share any proprietary material, the market is forced to accept whatever inefficient support model the supplier can offer.

Thankfully, we’re rapidly moving from the old days of having two extreme options. The first option is working in a world with locked down commercial licenses and no access to source code, while the second option on the other side was having all the code to play with and no support number to call for help or guidance.

Many companies sell software solutions under a commercial license where their customers get access to the source code for analyzing performance issues using their own profiling tools. For any organization that has their own technology team capable of compiling the application from source and inserting monitoring hooks, this can be a nice compromise where infrastructure risks can be managed internally but with the safety of external support should things go wrong.

It comes down to decomposition and transparency. The winners will be the ones that understand the market will reward companies offering choice of platform, services, support and leadership - none of which are dependent on each other.

Again, I love forcing people to innovate through disruption. If the game is not working for you then simply change the rules of the game.

I want to welcome Stuart Sim and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. Although his post was scheduled to appear on April 1st, 2008 (eastern U.S.), Stuart has run into problems that have delayed the posting. We will delay the posting by about a week. Stuart will be sharing some of his experiences with open source software from the perspective of a system architect and his activities in the business of supporting and growing open source applications.

Stuart Sim serves as the Chief Technology Officers and Chief Architect of Moodlerooms, which provides comprehensive technical support services to the Moodle course management system open source software. Stuart has spent the past 15 years developing enterprise solutions around the world in the education and financial sectors. His core expertise is in the design and delivery of large-scale implementations using combinations of classic and innovative development methodologies in distributed multi-disciplinary environments.

Prior to joining Moodlerooms, Stuart served as the Chief Architect of the Education Business Solutions group at Sun Microsystems. At Sun, he was involved with the development and promotion of open standards in education systems design to drive down the barrier of adoption of practical technical solutions using open source projects.

I met Stuart while I was working at the SUNY Learning Network and he was at Sun. Since then Stuart’s work has started to addresses some of the traditional concerns at universities about deploying an open source learning management system, opening opportunities for schools of varying capacity. Please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.

On “Doing OER,” the 20^th installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on March 1, 2008, by Amee Godwin. Amee serves as Program Director, OER Commons, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME).

Amee’s work focuses on connecting technology, education, and collaboration. At ISKME, she guides the development of content, interactivity, and partnerships for OER Commons, a teaching and learning network for open educational resources. Thanks Amee for a great posting!

In her posting, Amee moves the dialog around OER from concentrating on the content to exploring the process of creating, recreating, and reusing OER. She describes doing OER as a catalyst for exchanging ideas and knowledge creation among diverse communities of teachers. Amee then sets the stage by asking the following questions:

• What comprises “doing” OER?
• Does it take a new belief system?
• Are we doing it already?
• What examples are there to show off models for active engagement with OER?

Amee highlights some of the issues around community spaces for tagging, sharing, and creation, pointing to developments and activities such as the Library of Congress’ historical image collections in Flickr, the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium’s use of problem spaces, the wide spread use of LeMill.net by several hundred primary and secondary school teachers, and some of the great work that ISKME is doing through the OER Commons.

The focus of Amee’s message is that the potential for OER as a catalyst for change is in the doing, and that “Doing OER” requires support, tools, and a cultural shift in many organizations to take advantage of the strengths of networked communities of practice.

One of the roles of the OER Commons is to explore new models for teaching and learning that is a generative process in which OER is done through active inquiry, sharing, mentoring, in a cycle that includes feedback and peer involvement.

Amee’s posting provided us the opportunity to consider examples of OER in action and reflect on the “promise of OER,” leaving us with the question, are we… “getting any closer to it through the way that we are doing it.”

Comments

There were a number of questions and responses that flowed from the posting. Most of the dialog was around the importance of the process of creation of content as an element of learning. There was also comments and questions about the use and reuse of existing content and the importance of collaboration in knowledge creation.

Thanks again to Amee for her interesting and insightful post and responses. I also want to extend a big thank you to Christine Geith, and “cynthiaj” for adding to the post, and other folks who have been reading along. On April 1^st (no foolin’), Stuart Sim of Moodlerooms will be posting, which should be a very interesting topic relating to business models in open source software. The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.