Case Study III-4 • The Kuali Financial System: An Open-Source Project 467process, and enough institutions have joined to fund the
necessary activities of the Foundation.
Initially the Kuali Financials Board became the
Kuali Foundation Board, but additional members have
been added to represent new partner institutions and
NACUBO. The initial staff includes an executive director,
a quality assurance director, a Kuali member liaison, and a
lead technical architect.Additional Development Projects
The success of the KFS project has led to the establishment
of a number of other large development projects instituted
under the Kuali Foundation umbrella. Soon after the release
of the Phase I version of the KFS, the Kuali Foundation
announced the formation of a project called Kuali Coeus
(KC) to produce research administration software. This proj-
ect is based on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s
proven COEUS system, one of the first cradle-to-grave
award management systems in the nation. The KC project is
funded in part by a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation. The partner institutions that are con-
tributing resources to the project include Indiana University,
Cornell University and the Weill College of Medicine, MIT,
Michigan State University, and the University of Arizona.
The Kuali Coeus project is organized like the Kuali
Financials project with its own board composed of represen-
tatives of the partner institutions and a Functional Council
with representatives of the research administration people
from the partners. However, the Kuali Financials Technical
Council has become the overall Kuali Foundation Technical
Council so that all the Foundation’s projects will have the
same technical architecture. As before, the developers are
employees of the partner institutions. An early release of
Kuali Coeus is currently being implemented by partner
institutions.
Next came a project to develop a comprehensive
student services system. The Kuali Student project is
developing a modular, open-source, standards-based,
next-generation student system delivered through service-
oriented architecture and Web services.
In late 2009, the Kuali Foundation announced the
Kuali Open Library Environment (OLE) (pronounced
Oh-LAY) project to produce a comprehensive system for
the management of print and electronic collections for
academic and research libraries around the world. OLE is
creating a next-generation library system that breaks
away from print-based workflows and reflects the chang-
ing nature of library materials and new approaches to
scholarly work.
Up-to-date information on the activities of the Kuali
Foundation may be found at http://www.kuali.org.The KFS project has been a great success not only in
producing an outstanding open-source system for higher
education institutions but also in changing attitudes among
educational administrators about community source devel-
opment of administrative systems.
The Kuali Foundation
For the Kuali Financial System to continue to evolve and
adapt to future circumstances, there had to be some mech-
anism for coordinating ongoing activities over the long
run. Also, the success of Kuali in developing the KFS led
the Kuali leadership to conclude that the community
source approach should be applied to develop a complete
suite of administrative systems for higher education insti-
tutions. So the Kuali Board has established the Kuali
Foundation to perpetuate the KFS and to expand the Kuali
mission to include other administrative systems. Excerpts
from the announcement of the establishment of the Kuali
Foundation, a 501(c)(3) corporation, follow:
The Kuali Foundation is a non-profit organization
responsible for sustaining and evolving a compre-
hensive suite of administrative software that meets
the needs of all Carnegie Class institutions. Its
members are colleges, universities, and interested
organizations that share a common vision of open,
modular, and distributed systems for their software
requirements. The goal of Kuali is to bring the
proven functionality of legacy applications to the
ease and universality of online services.
The Foundation employs staff to coordinate the
efforts of partners, and to manage and protect
the Foundation’s intellectual property. The Kuali
Foundation manages a growing portfolio of enterprise
software applications for colleges and universities. A
lightweight Foundation staff coordinates the activities
of Foundation members for critical software develop-
ment and coordination activities such as source code
control, release engineering, packaging, documenta-
tion, project management, software testing and quality
assurance, conference planning, and educating and
assisting members of the Kuali Partners Program.The Kuali Foundation is funded by a combination of
grants and support from higher education institutions in
the form of memberships in the Kuali Partners Program.
The yearly membership dues are based on the institution’s
annual budget and range from $4,500 to $24,500. Since
Kuali systems are open source, an institution does not have
to become a member to get the software, but member insti-
tutions get to influence the development and enhancement