It is that time of the year – Baseball playoffs, football, short days etc. I was able to squeeze a round of golf a couple of days ago. The desperation showed – we were unwilling to stop though there was not enough light. The Red Sox are still alive but so are the Rays. Hope the Red Sox make it to the playoffs and turn their worst performance in September into a soaring October performance. Things in LTS are moving along well. We will soon be sending the Annual Report for 2010-2011 which will highlight many of our collective accomplishments. We will also be sending a communication today announcing a Google Support hotline, availability of additional Email aliases and a single point of contact for managing major projects for the academic departments.

Yesterday I met with Melissa Trevvett (Executive Director) and Amanda Schmidt (Asst. Director) from the Boston Library Consortium (BLC). We are one of the 17 members of the BLC and enjoy the benefits of the consortium at several levels. Melissa began her role as the Executive Director recently and is visiting the member institutions. During our brief meeting, we touched on the “C” word – “Collaboration” and I told Melissa about my views on Collaboration. It reminds me of the “A” word used by the media and politicians – “American People”. They are words that are used a lot but the answer to “Where is it?” or “Which American People told you this?” will likely to be a useless exercise.

Collaboration is loosely defined as a group of people or organizations who work collectively towards a shared goal. Of course, this requires that there is a shared goal. Mostly, the initial enthusiasm for collaboration quickly vanishes when meetings after meetings are held on deciding what the shared goals are. In many cases, the ones who initiated the collaboration conversation and may have some idea on a shared goal are busy attending other meetings, leaving a bunch of others to carry this forward.

Collaboration is hard. It requires serious commitment. It is a game of give and take and requires a lot of discipline. The forces acting against collaboration are extremely powerful and strong – sense of independence and diversity of our own institutions. There are so many Higher Ed institutions precisely because we each cater to a completely different audience. Whether it is the practices relating to the libraries or technology, it will be very hard to find two institutions with shared goals except in a few instances which would be considered marginal.

A common shared goal for all Higher Ed institutions is reducing cost. We have all joined various consortia, who on behalf of the members have negotiated favorable pricing that we all enjoy. This model is successful and easy when what is being purchased is common to a lot of us. NERCOMP and Microsoft licensing is a classic example of a successful “collaborative” effort. For the foreseeable future, we are stuck with Microsoft products and when we can get it at a lower price, who would complain. It is an easy win. Not so when it comes to a whole lot of other products because we all buy different products and have different requirements.

Similarly, libraries benefit enormously by joining consortial subscription agreements because the shared goal of subscribing to journals is easily achieved (because most institutions want to subscribe to many of the same journals). When we were discussing how on the surface it may appear that BLC institutions can collaborate on many interesting topics, we also agreed that the diversity amongst the member institutions is a serious factor.

Networking with our colleagues in our institution is a whole different ball game. All of us learn so much from these interactions and the fact that there is no real commitment (which is a requirement for any successful collaboration) to doing anything, we have the luxury to pick and choose which of the ideas learned is worth pursuing. And when we do pursue, we have colleagues to call on for help. The strong independent streak in all of us would then act on these and an idea we picked up may take a whole different path, which is natural and great.

On the other hand, several successful open source projects such as Apache (and related projects) , Firefox, Asterisk are true collaborations that work. In a book titled the Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric Raymond provides his observations on some of the key ingredients that makes open source development successful. Cathedral approach is one where software development is like building a cathedral – “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation”. Bazaar approach is the one used for open source and he characterizes that as “resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches”.

He then provides some guidelines for a successful open source collaboration which are nicely summarized here. I can see why these open source projects succeed but it is hard to apply them to many of our own “shared goals” – it may be that we like to build beautiful cathedrals than bazaar style building. How long can we afford to do this?