Mellon Research in Information Technology (RIT) Program

As you may have read by now, the Mellon Foundation is merging its Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) with it's Scholarly Communications program.  David Wiley published an excerpt from the email Mellon send to current grant recipients on his blog:

The Foundation is making a number of organizational changes designed to consolidate resources and concentrate them more effectively on the Foundation’s central objectives in support of its five core program areas: the liberal arts and humanistic scholarship in higher education, scholarly communications, museums and art conservation, performing arts, and conservation and the environment. As part of these changes, the Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) will be merged into the Scholarly Communications program and cease to exist as a standalone grantmaking program of the Mellon Foundation, effective January 4, 2010. The Scholarly Communications program, which will be renamed so as to indicate, explicitly, that technology-based grantmaking is part of its mandate, will assume responsibility for managing existing RIT grants and the planning of future grant initiatives that emphasize the development of information technologies in support of the Foundation’s core focus. As this merger occurs, my colleagues, Ira Fuchs, who founded the RIT program at the Foundation in 2000, and Christopher Mackie, will both be leaving the Foundation.

This gives a very different impression than the Chronicle of Higher Education's take which suggested this might be a blow to open source projects. It is just as easy to see this as a simple reorganization. Time will tell whether this means less or, more to the point, less effective funding. It could just as easily be more effective even if fewer dollars are allocated in total.

In many ways this is a natural result of success. The goal of foundations like Mellon is never to provide sustaining funding but, rather, to provide funding to catalyze change--priming the pump, as it were, to create a new self-sustaining ways of working. And with the success of so many RIT-funded projects it is clear that these investments have helped community-based open source development in Higher Education become a reality. And this, in turn, has changed the dynamics in the marketplace for the better. At this point in time I can see why it might make plenty of sense to focus attention on a vertical area (scholarly communication) rather than a horizontal one (information technology).

As for any implication that this would affect Sakai....I currently don't see how it would have much of an impact. Since the (extremely necessary) founding grant, Sakai has not asked for or received any funding from Mellon RIT.  We've built a community that is self-sustaining and able to build great software without external funding. This is not to say that we won't look for grants in the future and "scholarly communication" is certainly an important aspect of Sakai 3 so there might be an opportunity to work with Mellon again. And, in fact, the Sakaibrary Project received a grant from Scholarly Communications.

What I know we will miss is the insight and support of Ira Fuchs and Chris Mackie. Both have been tireless supporters of higher education open source in general and Sakai in particular. Their knowledge of the domain, their vision of an ecosystem of interconnected projects, and their insightful critiques have been very valuable even in the years after the grant ended. I wish them both well and am sure we will cross paths with them in the future.