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

The Kuali Community consists of sub-communities that collaborate on enterprise software systems, including Kuali Financial System (KFS), Kuali Coeus (KC) for research administration, and Kuali Student (KS). In early 2009, Kuali 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.

Each of these software systems 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 the efforts of partners, 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 the following concerns:

• Legal Services
• Intellectual Property
• Financial Management
• Hosting Services
• Community Coordination
• Collaboration Infrastructure
• Quality Assurance
• Communication Management
• Event Management
• Licensing
• Public Relations
• kuali.org (this website)

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)

Further reading:

• Kuali Foundation Board: Members and Meetings
• Kuali's Values
• History of Kuali
• Who is involved in Kuali Projects
• Articles of Incorporation, Bylaws and Resolutions and Policies
  

Other introductory resources:

• Kuali at a Glance Powerpoint Presentation
• Kuali Resource Guide