Cornell will soon adopt the Kuali Financial System, created "by higher education, for higher education." Cornell talent has contributed to the development of this "community source" software from its very beginning.

The Kuali project was born at a "summit meeting" at Indiana University in November 2004 with representatives from Indiana, Cornell, the University of Hawaii, the University of Arizona and rSmart, a consulting firm that supports open-source software. Five representatives from Cornell Information Technologies attended.

Instead of trying to modify business-oriented commercial software for university use, Indiana had built its own financial system. "People loved the functionality," says Bryan Hutchinson, development manager for the Kuali project at Cornell, who was part of that first Cornell delegation.

But it was an archaic "client-server" system. Indiana wanted to create an updated, Web-based system written in the universal Java language that runs on all computers. That would take more programmers than they could manage, so they invited some colleagues to join in.

Cornell bought into the idea, and in February 2005, Hutchinson and Aaron Godert, now co-director of the Cynergy project that applies Kuali technology at Cornell, joined a two-week planning meeting at Indiana. Godert went on to be one of several "tendered developers," employed by Cornell but devoted full time to the Kuali project. From that session, another two-week "boot camp" in March 2005 and another six months of work, the multischool team hammered out what would become the underlying framework for all Kuali applications, eventually named Rice. (Kuali is a Malaysian word for a wok, and most Kuali project names are cooking references. At least in Asia, rice is the basis of nearly all dishes.) Rice mainly manages workflow -- moving things from one person to another for changes or approval.

More Cornellians joined the team along the way, and other schools lined up as the project was formalized by the creation of the Kuali Foundation -- now up to 49 members.

Godert recalls a classic "balancing act" between technical realities and management perceptions. "They were getting anxious because they had signed up for this Kuali thing and hadn't seen a piece of working software yet, and we kept asking them to be patient," Godert reported in his blog. "Luckily, these stakeholders were gracious enough to allow us to do this upfront work, which has paid off in the long haul."

Along with the Kuali Financial System, Rice now underlies the Kuali Student, Kuali Coeus (a system for managing research grants) and forthcoming Kuali Open Library Environment and Kuali People Management systems. Cornell's slightly modified version of Rice, known as Cynergy, is used for 13 other homegrown Cornell applications as well as for the Kuali programs.

Today, Godert says, at least 25 people at Cornell are contributing to various Kuali projects as software developers or as participants in the governance of the Kuali effort. In return, the university gets software tailored to academic needs, with no annual licensing fees and support from peers.