The cost stress resulting from each campus going it alone by buying vendor products and filling in the spaces with internal staff has already brought us important community efforts. One example, the uPortal project, under the aegis of the JA-SIG has been a major success. Other successes are on the horizon – Sakai and Kuali being strong candidates. And there has been effort on the part of all three of these projects to work in coordination. In this document we consider extending that coordination to a standard framework for the digital campus, including the conditions and agreement needed to make it work.

With the move toward technical improvement there will be changes in the decision processes that govern software directions in Higher Education. A primary contributor to this change is the emergence of enterprise quality open source. The higher education community in particular is delivering components that have wide and vital usage. These components are under the guidance of the institutions, giving a level of control not seen with traditional vendor software. Along with this control comes risk and greater responsibility.

 “Unlike the tools found above, all tools below will cost you a lot of money and they do a damn good job of locking in your organisation.”

How will all these factors play together? This paper attempts to form some conclusions. Ultimately, the higher education community will decide.