Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: .LRN Consortium - Yet Another Governance Discussion

In an ideal world, the .LRN consortium would be a patron, a resource-strong sponsor of toolkit research and development. The consortium would be the main client of the many and well-distributed toolkit developing companies and individuals, who would find themselves serving a more knowledgeable and competent buyer without having to chase after it. In order for this to work, the consortium's budget would have to be large, built up by substantial membership fees from the .LRN universities around the world. But a large budget should not imply that funding is necessarily directed toward large projects. So-called "bike-shedding" must be avoided.

Bike-shedding (if I understand it correctly) is when small and non-risky projects, like building bike sheds, don't get any financing, because larger and riskier projects, like building power plants, are perceived as more substantial or professional and therefore easier and (paradoxically) safer to fund. As the OpenACS community of developers is a decentralized collection of specialized and precious resources, this funding strategy would be unusually inappropriate. It would mean that only one or two companies that are large enough would receive all the funding while the great majority of skillful and valuable developers would get none. Then the whole idea about avoiding vendor lock-in and monopolization would fall, along with so many toolkit developers.

From this perspective the problem and solution lie in forming a consortium that is an effective toolkit developing client. It needs to be able to collect a large pot of money and quickly distribute small portions of it throughout the (technical and evangelical) developer network. The consortium must rely heavily on the technical expertise of the OCT (or .LRN TAB) in order to be a conscious consumer of code. But it must also be a happy and frequent spender, because in this context spending means investing; the better the .LRN toolkit becomes, the more adopters it gets, and the more member fees flow into the spending machine that is the consortium. Let's get the money rolling!

Collapse
Posted by Alfred Essa on
Steffan, Thank you for the eloquent statement. A couple of comments:

As you note, one of the consortium's biggest challenges will be to define a funding strategy. There seems to be an emerging consensus in the business community that pure open source plays, such as OpenACS / .LRN, do not have an adequate business model and will fail in the long run. What this means for us, I believe, is that the funding strategy has to be more than just raising large amounts of money or charging "substantial membership fees". One of the reasons why many of us are in this game is that we cannot afford the capital investment and substantial license fees associated with proprietary software. {MIT is confronting a 10-15% cut next year.} The alternative is to define new business models and sustainable enterprises, which are grounded in economic reality, but connect industry, society, and the environment. This is why OpenACS/.LRN partnerships among the developers, universities, ngos is potentially very powerful if we collectively figure out how to harness our collective experience, energy, and resources.

A second point concerning small projects. There is good evidence that truly innovative organizations encourage and invest in smaller, autonomous R&D projects at the margins since this is likely to be a very important spring for new ideas and insights. I would hope that the consortium can also fund small R&D grants.