KARL Project

The KARL Project in an open source, web-based collaboration tool developed by the Open Society Foundations (OSF). It was first introduced in 2008 and is now used by a broad range of international organizations, including OXFAM GB and OSF.

Etymology
As an acronym, KARL stands for the “Knowledge And Resource Locator.”

Pre-KARL
In September 2005, the OSF Board and Senior Management began a Knowledge Management Initiative (KMI) to explore ways that the OSF 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 OSF 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 2006, the working group made a recommendation to OSF 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 OSFs’ communication and collaboration needs, but could not find an appropriate solution that could offer both the functionality that OSF 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 OSF 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
OSF management approved the working group recommendation in July 2006 and development of the new OSF system began the following month (August 2006). A beta-version of the system was delivered in June 2007 and OSF officially launched the KARL1 system in January 2008.

KARL 2
As KARL attracted interest, the OSF 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-designed, provided important infrastructure changes.

KARL 3
During the KARL2 work, 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.