Background of KARL
The Open Society Institute (OSI) is a private operating and grantmaking foundation that aims to shape public policy to promote democratic governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform. OSI is an integral part of the Soros Foundation Network, a world-wide network of over 40 independent organizations.
Collectively, OSI and the Soros Foundations Network encompass global programs addressing issues such as judicial reform and the rule of law, independent media, public health, gender equity, human rights and governance, information and internet innovations, economic and business development, and education from preschool to post-doctoral levels. National foundations and regional offices in over 40 countries engage in similar issues on a more local level, resulting in a multidimensional intersection of international and local advocates, experts, managers, and infrastructure staff populating the OSI network. Further information about these entities and their work is available on www.soros.org.
Pre-KARL
As a highly decentralized network of cultural and civil society organizations, the Soros Foundation Network faces many of the challenges of collaboration and knowledge sharing as other distributed organizations. In September of 2005, the OSI Board and Senior Management began a Knowledge Management Initiative (KMI) to explore ways that the OSI network of organizations could work more effectively across geographic and programmatic divides. The initiative started with a small core group in the autumn of 2005 that explored both the organizational and technical structure of OSI to look for improvements that could be made. In early 2006, a working group of 25 staff members representing various geographic and programmatic areas of our network was established. The working group met by way of web conference on a monthly basis and used an open-source collaboration tool known as Plone to share ideas and possible solutions. This working group also received oversight and input from a group of 10 senior managers within the network of organizations.
In June of 2006, the working group made a recommendation to OSI Senior Management to invest in the development of a global intranet and on-line collaboration system. The working group had researched the possibility of finding a proprietary solution for OSI’s communication and collaboration needs, but could not find an appropriate solution that could offer both the functionality that OSI was looking for and the flexibility to be able to offer tools to partner organizations and other individuals (grantees, consultants, specialists, etc.) working closely with OSI without being subjected to restrictive licensing fees and requiring users to install special software. The working group had been quite pleased with the Plone collaboration tool that was being used to manage the work of the group, so the further recommendation was made to develop this new system using the open source Plone software over the Zope application server.
KARL 1
OSI management approved the working group recommendation in July 2006 and development of the new OSI system began the following month (August 2006). A beta-version of the system was delivered in June 2007 and OSI officially launched the KARL1 system in January of 2008. KARL is essentially a global intranet for OSI which offers a unique intranet homepage for each of the 40+ organizations within the SFN and offers the ability for individuals within the network to self-organize within various communities of practice related to the mission of OSI.
KARL 2
As KARL attracted interest, OSI took steps to move KARL1 off of the Windows platform, in preparation for making an open source version. Additionally, work was commissioned to make it possible (though not trivial) for other organizations to customize KARL and use it for similar needs.
This work was commissioned in April 2008 and completed in the fall of that year. It resulted in a version of KARL which, though not re-architected, provided important infrastructure changes.
The system currently has about 3000 users with about half of the users being OSI employees and the other half from organizations outside of OSI. KARL also has over 500 communities.
KARL 3
During the KARL2 work, it became clear that the goals for adoption of KARL and ongoing enhancements required architectural re-thinking. Work was commissioned on a version of KARL that used the technologies shared by Plone, but with a narrower focus on the KARL application. Many of the problematic technologies were replaced. This effort culminated in the release of KARL3 in spring of 2009.
