Achieving Flexibility via Service-Centric Community Source: The Case of Kuali

Service-centric application development has become one of the most important paradigms in software engineering, and collaborative open source development has emerged as a new way for organizations to develop new applications that are either not available or too expensive to acquire. A most recent trend is to combine service centricity with open source development collaborated by multiple organizations to develop scalable and flexible information systems. However, service centricity and open source collaboration involve innovative concepts and practices that are very new to many. As such, there are a lot of confusion among both researchers and practitioners in this area. In this paper, we investigate several important concepts surrounding service-centric open source development via the case of Kuali including service-oriented architecture, workflow technology, and technology flexibility as well as the relationships among those concepts. In particular, we concentrate on understanding the relationships between technology flexibility and emerging technologies. One important contribution of this paper is the introduction of community source as a unique open source concept to the MIS community. Finally, we report several research findings and outline a number of research directions in the related areas.