For an economy and community to be successful, the participants need to believe in it. If no one believes in the community that brings them together, it fails.

There is an important connection here in which imagination and opportunity are close friends. Imagination offers the mind a vision of how things could be. If there is a viable path toward this future, we build a sense of opportunity. If there is no viable path, we enter the world of fantasy.

Think how much could be saved if new foundation grants begin requiring interoperability with a set of core community source projects.

Other institutions can spend nothing and download the full, free software from the Sakai Project, but they will not have had any influence in the evolution of the software, nor will they have gained the considerable skills from inter-institutional knowledge-sharing.

Ineffective governance of projects, unproductive debates over technology nuances, or failure to sustain an IT strategy over multiple years could all impede community source success.

If partnering for software development were easy, it would be the norm today. It is not easy. It requires a cooperative mindset, disciplined choices among staff, and leaders’ consistent vision that the value of partnering over the long term exceeds the easy short-term gains of defecting to local priorities.

the first challenge for participants in a community source project is to find like-minded partners who share a similar vision and timeline.

If the community source model proves viable, it will do so because it is an economically efficient coordinating mechanism for software investments in higher education as an industry. An analysis of any historical software system—online card catalogs, Web-based registration, course management systems—over a five-year period will reveal that individual institutions separately invested hundreds of millions of dollars in home-grown or commercial software. Can that flow of higher education resources be harnessed to create better economics and shared innovation outcomes for everyone?