While many users will be focusing on the cleaner interface and much-needed new features (like a decent wiki, and a blog you can comment on), the big idea in Moodle 2.0 is connecting to the outside world.  Moodle will finally have APIs that allow other sites and programs to interact with your online courses, opening up all kinds of new application possibilities.

But I think the most intriguing idea is the ‘Community Hub‘.  Moodle 2.0 will make it possible to create directories of online courses that are available across Moodle sites.  It will also allow the downloading of course templates, or even entire courses, from other Moodle sites that wish to share.  Moodle ‘hubs’ will be the directories where Moodle sites send their information if they are looking for outside students to enroll, or want to share their course materials with others.

But here’s the key:  anyone can be a Moodle ‘hub’.  A university department, or a professional organization, could become a Community Hub for sharing course materials.  This takes the open courseware idea to the next level:  instead of seeing the syllabus and lecture notes, you download the actual course, activities and all, tailor it to your needs, and execute.

Will there be an advantage to becoming the Community Hub for a subject?  Beyond the obvious reputational benefits, we can guess that schools closest to the center of these information-sharing networks will take the lead in using this information effectively.  If the commoditization of standard course offerings continues–where traditional lecture/textbook/test courses all look the same, online or offline–universities will need to use the standard course as a foundation, but then create unique learning experiences that offer something more.  Providing only a commodity educational process–or a process that isn’t even as good as the commodity–is not a fun place for our university business model to be.

According to Moodle’s planning docs, the Community Hub server is only 60% done, so who knows whether it will be released this summer.  That might give you more time to create your plan for educational global domination.

I wrote the paper because I see a number of organizations (including my own dear University) using what I call a substitution strategy for open source:  rip out existing proprietary software, and replace it with a ‘free’ open source equivalent.  That strategy has advantages, but it ignores many of the unique benefits of open source use.  I classify these unique advantages into two types:  an increased rate of innovation inside organizations (innovation), and an increased rate of innovation sharing between organizations (knowledge reuse).

In certain situations, such as my San Francisco local government study, I’d argue that the smarter open source strategy would be innovation, not substitution.  Focus your open source efforts on new deployments for unmet organizational needs, and let them grow.  Don’t spend all your time trying to replace existing proprietary software that ‘works’.

A version of the open source innovation paper is available here, but the copyright now belongs to the IEEE.  Let’s hope they use it wisely.

I gave a talk on my open source deployment research in San Francisco (talk title:  “Open Source Deployment at the City and County of San Francisco:  From Cost Reduction to Rapid Innovation”).  Open Source (or öppen kod, as they say) attracted good interest, particularly with the eGovernment angle.  I also served as an external examiner on Ella Kolkowska’s licentiate thesis, which focused on a values-based approach to IS security.  As Örebro, along with many other European universities, makes the transition to a more American-style system of rewards based on publications, strategies for cracking the right journals were another hot topic.

I’ll miss having the intellectual stimulation of Karin, Ella, Fredrik, Johan P, Johan A, Kai, Nena, Hannu, and the entire group on the rest of our sabbatical world tour.  Thanks Örebro!

While cost-cutting is often seen as the big selling point for open source, faster ‘time-to-market’ for new applications is the focus of our results.  To quote one of our respondents:

“Now, you can stand up that site in 8 hours, four hours, have it done by the
end of the day.  It flips the customer out.  Really?  I thought it would take 2
months.  Being responsive is huge.  Technology changes fast, but business
requirements change faster.”

For example, there’s no way the recoverysf.org site would have been built in less than three weeks without using an open source platform (WordPress), and without a new technology mindset.  It’s a mindset where the IT department sees itself as offering great new products for its diverse customers, rather than trying to control and constrain them all the time.

The paper with our preliminary research results is currently under review.  Please contact me if you’d like a draft.  Special thanks to the City’s CTO Blair Adams, USF MBA Dave Geller, and all of the study participants.

I presented some preliminary research on open source communities for business platforms at OSCOMM 2009, the first international workshop on open source communities, held after OSS 2009 in Skövde, Sweden.  Our data shows that the best supported platform with the highest number of community-contributed extensions is WordPress, followed by Joomla, phpBB, MediaWiki, and Drupal.  Moodle, SugarCRM, Elgg, Magento, and Gallery are the next five, with not much in the way of community contributions after that.  Only award-winning open source software packages that a business user would directly interact with were included.

The paper and slides are available at the OSCOMM program website.  The paper is called “Community Building for Open Source Business Applications:  The Core-Extensions-Theme Pattern”.

The formal one was a presentation to our USF Wikis and Blogs group on “Pro Blogging for Dorks Academics”. I talked about the main tradeoffs I see for academic blogging:

• The personal vs. professional balance
• The person vs. topic focus

I also talked about why academic blogging has been valuable for me:

• Self-expression – the usual reason to blog, but looking back over a year’s worth of posts, categories, topics and tags gives you a new perspective on your interests. Writing practice doesn’t hurt either.
• Republishing – I’ve had at least one example of a conference paper that was translated and published in a journal, after it was found on the blog.
• Connections – I’ve met people with similar interests, both academic and professional, that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. My biggest success was finding the designer of a web site I had used in a teaching case, with zero additional work on my part. I posted my case, and within 24 hours the designer, who I had never met before, left a comment with great behind-the-scenes information about the site.
• Media – I’ve had reporters find me through my blog, which can be good or annoying. I showed a recent example where my analytics data told me a reporter had spent almost half an hour on my blog before contacting me for an interview. That information gave me confidence this person was serious, and worth giving some time to.
• Explaining publications – hey, academic publications don’t make sense to a lot of people basically everyone, including people who might be able to use your findings. Blog posts give me the chance to explain publications and presentations in somewhat normal language.
• The living CV – I’m not sure if this is good or not, but I seem to do many things that wouldn’t make it to my academic CV.  The academic blog is a place to capture those. It’s great for those end-of-year reviews, promotion cases, and to quickly introduce others to my work and interests.

Two days later, I gave a spontaneous show-and-tell on my Moodle site (university.jpedia.org) that I use instead of our official Blackboard product. USF is considering Moodle as an alternative, but it will be another classic example of selling the unfamiliar benefits of open source to an institution that has spent serious time and energy on the proprietary path. In industry, open source can sneak in the back door on new projects, and gradually take over from within. Ripping out the existing system is a tougher sell, without some vision of the long-term innovation benefits.

The teaching module, “Instant Websites:  Using WordPress as a Content Management System”, is now available:

• The “Instant Websites” Teaching Case Executive Summary
• The “Instant Websites” Instruction Module
• The “Instant Websites” Teaching Note

Thanks to the USF Faculty Development Committee for supporting my research this summer.

2,604,288. That’s the number of people running WordPress blogging software on their own websites, with their own web hosting. You’d think that only a hard-core techie fringe would choose to pay for their own web hosting, and deal with the geekiness of it all, when they can get WordPress for free on wordpress.com.  But, as of this morning, 3,870,299 blogs were running on wordpress.com.  That’s a close race.

In other words, the do-it-yourself web crowd is looking mainstream, not fringe.

The one-click install revolution on web hosts has made this possible.  The amount of software/web services power at your disposal with today’s inexpensive web hosting is ridiculous.  Take a look at a typical menu of open source software choices (this one is from Simple Scripts).  Blogs, wikis, forums, serious content management, e-commerce, CRM…often the best software in its category.  We know people are using install scripts, because of the growing number of blogs that are launching with slightly out-of-date versions of WordPress.  (Script services are often behind the latest version, one of the downsides of using one-click installs vs. slapping it together by hand.)

Not all is perfect in one-click install land.  Upgrades and backups are nowhere near as painless as getting started.  But it’s been good enough to compete with free, and it keeps hope alive for a more open web future:  not everything has to happen through Google, Yahoo!, MSN or even wordpress.com.