Research in Information Technology program being consolidated
An article in Tuesday’s Chronicle of Higher Education about the end of a Mellon Foundation program that funded several popular open source efforts has education IT pros buzzing about what the fate of those efforts.
The article reports that the Research in Information Technology program, opened in 2000, will be folded into Mellon’s broader Scholarly Information program. RIT has been instrumental in funding open source projects such as the Sakai education collaboration program, Kuali administration software and Zotero research tool.
The news of RIT’s shuttering has reverberated across the education community, with bloggers such as Brigham Young’s David Wiley calling attention to the merger, loads of Twitter retweets of the Chronicle article and buzz on EDUCAUSE’s IT Architects mailing list (one group member has recommended it be a topic of discussion at the group’s meeting Thursday, while another has attempted to comfort supporters of the open source projects that pledged grants aren’t going away).
Blogger Michael Feldstein (an Oracle product manager) emphasized in a blog post that the RIT move does not mean Mellon will stop giving money to software projects: “Perhaps more importantly for the Sakai community and the Sakai-curious, Sakai has not received Mellon funding (to my knowledge) for a few years now and is not dependent on it. So this announcement, while unfortunate, has no impact on Sakai’s development or its future.”
