An update on Kuali Student during turbulent financial times; the latest on KS and the Rice Charter; service documents now available to the public; and introducing the valuable insight of Norm Wright. Note: Most links require login to KS Confluence.
Project News
A Bright Light in Dark Times
During difficult economic times, it is natural to wonder about the status of an organization and a project. The good news is that the KS Board reports that “Kuali Student is seen as a bright light during these difficult financial times and the funding contributions are protected as much as possible.”
However, as funding continues to get tighter, the Board stressed that the project must deliver the product by March 2010, with implementations on many of our campuses shortly after. With the project timeline set for delivery in March 2010, please review the updated R1 Dashboard.
Rice Charter and Kuali Student
The updated Rice Project Charter now aligns better with the KS SOA approach and the Application Roadmap Committee and the Technical Roadmap Committee (TRC) are in place to develop future directions.
Now, the TRC is responsible for ensuring that there is proactive work done to ensure that RICE is moving forward and adopting new technologies. When new middleware technologies are required the TRC will look first at other open source products like Apache rather than building them into RICE. KS Board noted two key outcomes for KS as a result of the joint board meetings:
1. All Kuali projects (including KS or any other new project) should consider RICE as the default or starting place for technical architecture investigations. A project needs to show why RICE will not work rather than evaluating it to see if it is acceptable. If gaps are found between the project functional needs and RICE, the project should work with the TRC to resolve the gaps and build a roadmap for moving RICE forward.
2. Both Google Web Toolkit (GWT), the Business Rule Management System (BRMS) and underlying Drools technology have been accepted as RICE components. The TRC will work to develop a roadmap for how these technologies fit with the other RICE components and prepare guidelines for how and when they should be used.
Service Contract Documents Available On
line
Kuali Student service contracts are now publicly available for review on the Web. These contracts define the integration points between modules and the core infrastructure and between the modules themselves. There are three classifications of service contracts for the Kuali Student System: Business Services, Infrastructure Services, and Infrastructure Interfaces.
Remember: The service contracts are currently under development. Do not consider these service contracts to be final!
Deleting Wiki Pages
Do you have a wiki page to be deleted? If so, please be sure to make sure that all children below the page are to be deleted as well and then rename the page SCOTT DELETE ME - page title (or something along those lines). Keeping it all caps helps me to locate and execute requested changes.
If the page is to be retained, click the edit tab and enter the name of the appropriate parent page. The parent page cannot be "Home" or "KS <Space Name>." If you have any questions, contact Scott Shepherd (UMCP).
Beyond the Norm
Norm Wright (MIT) has offered to share some of his valuable insights on the project with KS Insider. Share your thoughts in the blog comments section. Contact Scott Shepherd if you also are interested in a making a contribution to the blog.
Configuration in Kuali Student
Discussions of configuration have been swirling around the Kuali Student team recently. Configuration has been a central goal of Kuali Student since its founding with our emphasis on open standards, service contracts, rules engines and workflow engines.
These are accepted practices that industry experts would readily agree are key to reaching our goal of making Kuali Student configurable. Less known – and perhaps understood – is Kuali Student's focus on configuration in three other areas:
- The use of types to model high level entities such as degree programs, requirements, courses and activities so they can be extended and recombined to handle the newly emerging experiential and project based models of delivering educational content.
- The integration of dictionary services that allow for easy configuration of basic information such as the size of a field, cardinalities, labels, validations, and help messages.
- The development of a UI framework that allows for a declarative configuration of the layout of fields on the screens.
Individually, these modes of configuration are but incremental improvements on past practices. None are radically new concepts in and of themselves. Each makes one mode of configuration easier to do and manage. Taken together however, these modes create a qualitative change in what it means for a system to be configurable. Taken together, these modes of configuration result in a playground of building blocks that can be assembled and reassembled as needed. Taken together, these modes of configuration result not in single system for schools to adopt and try to use but an ecosystem where schools can configure and recombine in ways not originally envisioned by any of founding universities
The Impact of this Configuration on Consortium Development
The impact of this result, while wonderful by itself, has a very interesting and beneficial influence on development by a consortium. The Kuali Student community source effort is such a consortium. In the life cycle of any development effort, there comes a time when the question is asked, "What exactly are we going to build?" Which requirements are in and which are out? In a consortium, each institution has a vested interest in seeing that their requirements are "in" and are unconcerned about the others. These competing interests can lead to disaster.
The wonderful result of the deep level of configurability in Kuali Student is that we never reach that state because every school's requirements are requirements of Kuali Student. We make the clear distinction between Kuali Reference University (KRU), the specific configuration for a fictional school and Kuali Student, which is the infrastructure available to all schools that choose to adopt Kuali Student. KRU may not expose every requirement, but KS should be configurable to meet all schools requirements. Yes, there is still a level of trust that is required. Will KS really be as configurable as we plan? The founders and partners are answering that question by putting all their efforts into making sure the system is configurable, rather than arguing over the details of what will show up in KRU. This is the beautiful result of the level of configurability being developed by Kuali Student.
Calendar
June
7-10 CANHEIT – Montreal
10-16 KS Services Workshop - Boston
18-19 Advanced CAMP - Philadelphia
July
8-10 Sakai Conference – Cambridge, MA
19-21 AACRAO Technology Conference – Tucson, Ariz.
Labels: news; Rice; Norm Wright
2 comments:
Thanks for the regular communication Scott.
I'd like to add to what you've said about the Rice project charter and the path forward for Rice. It's important for our project (KS) and the other application projects like KFS and KC to think of Rice as "ours." The Rice project is composed of representatives from each of the application projects and has set up operational and governance structures like the board, TRC, and ARC to ensure that the work of the Rice team is a cooperative effort that truly serves the needs of the application projects.
In other words, when we think of Rice, don't think of it as something apart from Student. We should think of it as a core part of our own project and the means for us to share in addressing the common needs between Kuali applications.
Excellent point Chris. The Rice Charter revision should create a greater sense of "ownership" of Rice from all of the Kuali projects. In the end, Rice exist to assist the complete of Kuali Student and other applications.
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