Open Source Bridge - How Two Fools Made Themselves Indispensible From Their Basement Office
Chris Chiacchierini, Mason Bondi - Oregon College of Oriental Medicine
- 50 staff, 250 students
- university originally chose proprietary commercial cms for $15K
- used for marketing site
- only one of 5 people in the world using it
- attended open source conference and learned about open source cmses
- "holy shit, we just got snowed"
- chose Joomla! for ease of use
- didn't want to give up on open source cmses
- went to library, asked if they'd be interested in putting up a site using oss cms
- did this all under the radar, wanted to wait until it was too late to go back before anyone knew
- through this a lot of institutional knowledge is being built, and since people had freedom they were starting to get more creative
- class materials being put online
- financial information about student loans
- lots of people and departments were using the open source cms
- once it was opened up to the students, it really started to take off
- two parallel forces going
- got call while he was on vacation -- marketing site got hacked
- could now go to executive council with security concerns and propose switching over to the open source cms
- was getting hacked every couple of days
- executive council asked how much it would cost
- couldn't believe cost would be $0
- 4-5 departments already using the open source CMS loved it
- what about the rest of the community?
- every single office at the university has a stake
- lots of departments only updated static information once a year
- weren't interested in doing anything with the CMS, or are too busy
- e.g. grades--wanted to put grades online
- would be vastly more efficient than mailing, but hard to make people change
- a project management cycle that works
- opportunity -> needs analysis -> cost benefit analysis (proof of concept) -> project plan proposal -> approval -> design, build test -> implementation & training -> review
- most often the people with the money aren't the ones who have the technological know-how so there's a lot of politics involved
- a lot of the project management cycle is done in stealth mode
- technical people tend to want to take the ball and run with it and tell everyone to get out of the way, but this doesn't work without a sponsor
- need to get a sponsor at the executive level
- often best to get the person who has the power to pull the rug out from under you to be the sponsor--they get part of the credit
- need to sell the idea to a sponsor in the opportunity phase
- still selling hard in the needs analysis phase
- can do some of this in stealth--pick people you like and trust to get a little bit of insight into what the needs are
- after this, set up a needs analysis meeting to ask for feedback--make it clear this is the one chance people have to offer feedback
- better than going office to office--gets everyone in the same room
- people see what the impact is outside of their own department
- also lets people gripe if they want to
- in cost/benefit phase have to make sure the proof of concept is in place
- can't only look at cost as cost of the software--also involved is implementation, training, cost of support, etc.
- project plan proposal--where people who gave feedback see what will actually be implemented
- even though it won't be exactly what each person wanted, they'll see the bigger picture
- approval -- doesn't only mean budget, but once something's approved there's no turning back
- if you're not sure you can follow through, stop before approval
- after approval you HAVE to deliver
- implementation & training
- second tier thing they implemented was putting course materials online using moodle (course management software)
- no way could get everyone involved and get all the instructors to get all their materials online
- students weren't excited at first either, but once they used it they won't go back
- had a goal of rolling out three classes per quarter as a pilot
- chose instructors that taught enough classes that most of the students would be involved
- none of the courses are exclusively online but there are pieces of the course you can only get online
- followed faculty around for three weeks, constant contact, asked for feedback from both instructors and students
- important to get everyone comfortable
- what they wanted to happen started to happen--students didn't want to deal with printed materials anymore
- students started talking to faculty members whose courses weren't online
- building things out slowly builds inertia, but always keep the costs in mind
- as far as timing goes, as long as you can keep showing progress, specific deadlines aren't that important
- if possible getting isolated focused time with people is ideal for getting things ramped up
- can avoid ongoing and future training, also gets people thinking more creatively
- review
- constant cycle
- some formal review, some informal
- important to make incremental changes so the solution continues to meet the needs
- before the cms project started, the IT guys were seen as a necessity
- now people are looking at the IT department as something that can help with solutions
- creating a lot of work for the department
- through a successful project you can gain "street cred"
- create a working relationship with other departments
