Kuali is a growing community of universities, colleges, businesses, and other organizations partnering to build and sustain open-source software for higher education, by higher education. Kuali software is designed for all sizes of institutions, from land-grant research universities to community colleges. The members of the Kuali Community share a common vision - open, modular, and distributed systems. Kuali software is released under the Educational Community License.

The Kuali Community has sub-communities who collaborate on enterprise software systems, including Kuali Financial System (KFS), a module rich accounting system geared to higher education needs, Kuali Coeus (KC) for research administration, and Kuali Student (KS). In early 2009, Rice was added to this portfolio as a fully funded project to evolve a middleware infrastructure common to the other Kuali software. Late 2009 brought the Kuali Open Library  Environment (OLE) and the Kuali Ready projects on board. The two newest projects are Kuali People Management for Enterprise (KPME), and Kuali Mobility (Mobility). Each system and their supporting Communities are referred to as Kuali Projects, even though they are on-going, sustained efforts.

The Kuali Projects are tied together by the Kuali Foundation, a non-profit organization that coordinates, manages and protects the community's intellectual property, and handles common concerns among the Kuali Projects. The lightweight Foundation staff works with Community members to address members' concerns. The Kuali Foundation Board of Directors oversees the health and growth of the Kuali Foundation and its projects, and defines the Kuali brand. Each Project has its own Charter, Board of Directors, Project Management, Functional Council and Developers.

Projects are viewed as functionally driven; the subject-matter-experts that comprise the Functional Council make decisions on the software's functionality and priorities. (see example of a Project org structure)

Watch a Video - Hear from members of the Kuali Foundation
 

Further reading:

Kuali Audited Annual Financials

Financials Fiscal Year 2010

Foreword to Financials Fiscal Year 2011

Financials Fiscal Year 2011