The Community Source Model in Higher Education (Excerpt from Wheeler, 2007 in References)

The Community Source Model is a hybrid model that blends elements of directed development, in the classic sense of an organization employing staff and resources to work on a project, and the openness of traditional open-source projects like Apache. The resulting software is available under an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license. The code can be examined, changed, redistributed, sold, or incorporated into other products without fee. Anyone can make changes, and subject to quality review, those changes can be incorporated back into an open-source application for the benefit of all.

The distinguishing feature of the Community Source Model is that many of the investments of developers' time, design, and project governance come from institutional contributions by colleges, universities, and some commercial firms rather than from individuals. These contributions may be tendered as the first phase of a project, and then additional work may be contributed on an ongoing, voluntary basis by those institutions with a continuing interest in the project. The project often establishes a software framework and baseline functionality, and then the community develops additional features as needed over time.

Community Source Model projects generally operate as follows. Several institutions realize they are trying to solve a similar problem—need for a research administration system is a recent example. After some discussions and resulting agreement on project objectives, timelines, and philosophy, the institutions pool their resources under a project board of institutional leaders. The institutions are often agreeing to tender existing staff time to the direction of the project, and as such, this is not a new cash outlay but rather an aggregation of existing staff in a virtual organization. A grant from a foundation may provide cohesion among the investors. Typical recent projects have ranged from $1 to $8 million in funding and from twelve to thirty months in duration. Each investor signs a Corporate Contributor Agreement that grants a copyright license for the software to the project or foundation (modeled on the practice of the Apache Foundation). The project usually operates on a date-driven delivery schedule. This forces difficult decisions in the reality triangle of balancing features, resources, and time, but such a schedule is essential to the growth of community confidence.

The project board then establishes the appropriate structure for articulating the system requirements, the technical choices, and a project manager. It is essential that clear roles and responsibilities be established early, and the project participants will benefit from spending some face-to-face time together at the beginning of the project. Experience reveals that some staff members may not work well in distributed, virtual organizations, whereas others find the work to be career-renewing.

Early projects had to transition from an investor-based project to a community and a foundation. New projects can take advantage of the foundations' existing infrastructure and how-to knowledge and can begin as a project of a foundation. There is no rulebook for Community Source Model projects for every domain, but there is a growing body of accumulated wisdom on how to coordinate institutional investments and execute a development plan for quality software.