Community employment option

The conference in Newport Beach was very productive for me. I presented (or co-presented) in a few sessions and I spent time talking with members of the community at various institutions. I have been pretty open about my employment situation and I think some schools and vendors were sending me some reassuring signals about prospects somewhere else. I must have felt empowered by that, because after a brief discussion with the attendees at the OSP post conference session on Friday, I started to wonder if I didn't have another option worth floating by the community.

This is the email I sent out to a lot of folks that I thought would be interested in funding a Sakai community position to try to devote someone's time to coordination of the many different aspects of the Open Source Portfolio development for a little while.

For several years, I have heard each of us talk about what a challenge it is to balance the effort between "local needs" and "community efforts" within the Sakai community. As we struggle to quickly demonstrate value of the open source model to our respective administrations, it is easy to forget the risks and hidden costs incurred by everyone using the software in order to achieve short term wins for our local institutions. We have all recognized a need to be able to thoughtfully consider, shape and select development projects in a manner that represents our shared direction. At the Newport Beach conference I was encouraged by the approval of a process to shape, approve and develop high quality projects going forward.

Some of us talked about the need to not only plan our software together, but also to be able to work together to leverage our own scarce resources to execute those plans. We recognized that many of our member institutions are particularly well versed in various aspects of these projects (pedagogy, systems analysis, design, programming, QA and documentation), but none of us have all of those resources focused on the OSP project at any one time. This sort of distributed development will likely require a fair amount of community coordination.

It is not a secret that I am going to be going through a transition as soon as the grant funding that pays for my position at Syracuse dries up. One option I may have is to work within one of the schools or companies that are committed to the OSP software. I am sure I would enjoy working at any one of the schools or for a vendor that was involved in the project. If I did, I am sure that I would find opportunity to continue to contribute to the project in ways that are in alignment with that organization's goals. Not surprisingly, most of us can't magically create positions to bring in new people at a moment's notice. However, each school/vendor may have some discretionary funding to spend on the project that is left unallocated. With that assumption in mind, I wonder if there is another option that may allow me to contribute in ways as an agent of the community as a whole.

I'd like to explore the possibility of a new position (made possible through contributed funding to the Sakai Foundation) of an OSP Project Coordinator that would be funded by the commitment of resources from our member institutions in order to ensure that an agent of the community was always available to do the work of communicating community vision, planning the work of the OSP project and organizing community efforts. I realize that paving my own road is probably a risky idea, but I think it may be a great way to stay plugged in and benefit the community in a way that I couldn't as an agency of AN institution. Given enough contributors, the individual contributions may be small to support such a position. It is a creative solution to keep myself employed as well as meet an important community need. I would be looking to Syracuse to simply give me a small office, access to some services and continue my benefits package as an in kind contribution.

Do you think that there would be any interest from the community to fund such a position? If so, what would be the stipulations on funding it? Do you feel it would increase the likelihood of success of of OSP? Or would it be perceived as just stealing money from local efforts?