Kuali Foundation Board Comments on Changes at the Mellon Foundation

As many of you have read, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has merged its Research in Information Technology (RIT) program into the Scholarly Communications program (to be renamed) led by program officer Don Waters. This change at the Mellon Foundation has prompted some questions and considerable misinformation regarding its effect on Kuali Projects. Thus, the Foundation Board wishes to convey the following points:

1.   Higher Education would have been considerably slower in learning how to pool our resources, synchronize our needs, and develop enterprise-grade software without the timely investments of the Mellon Foundation during the RIT program’s ten years. The Mellon brand and seed capital – always a minor investor relative to the scale of institutional investments – was catalytic in creating the Community Source model of institutional investment and commercial support. For this, the many participants in Kuali projects are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation and the work of Ira Fuchs, Chris Mackie, Don Waters, and others over the years.