Blogs

Q: “Can I see the project plan for Q1? For the year?”

A: I’ve been asked this perfectly reasonable question many times since I started on Sakai. And frankly, it’s been a tad bit embarrassing to reply, “umm, not yet”, over and over and over….

So, I’d like to talk about that a bit, and yes, show a project plan. Today, for Q1. Soon, for the rest of the project.

Last post I introduced myself, and now I'd like to introduce the managed project team. Over the past couple of weeks, quite a few people have come on board as "resources" dedicated to the project, and I'm excited to see the team grow into a cohesive group. Almost all these folks are full-time on the project. Here's the list today.

Project Director

Alan Marks, Sakai Foundation

Product Manager

Hello!

I wanted to take this opportunity to say hello to the broader Sakai community, to introduce myself, and to open a dialog about the Sakai 3 initiative. Although I can tend to write long messages, I’ll keep this one short.

My name is Alan Marks, and I am the newly appointed Sakai 3 Project Director. I am very excited to have joined the Sakai community, and especially the Sakai 3 project.

The conference is over, the chairs have been cleaned away and I have had a few days to recover from the jet lag and 24 hour delay in airplane transfer at Chicago.

Looking back, I was glad that I had made it to Denver, not that I saw much outside the Hotel. The usual for the Sakai community, creative energy was sparking in the background. The opensyllabus tool looked strong; the project coordination meeting on Sunday had a frank and honest debate both for the Sakai 2 and Sakai 3 products. I enjoyed the presentations from the teaching awards and the lists go’s on.

I would like to draw your attention to some important changes in plumbing that is used in the hybrid integration between Sakai 2 and Sakai 3. First a little background… Previously, an authentication mechanism existed that allowed a system external to Sakai 2 to call into its services while not prompting the user for authentication and trusting the external system for the user’s identity. This has been used primarily to allow services in Sakai 3 to call services in Sakai 2 to retrieve, for example, lists of sites for which the user is a member.

Economies of scale was a critical reason to start the Sakai project. Several universities working together on software development could produce a final product much less expensively than each of us working on our own. (And, of course, build the software we wanted to use.) Because we could eliminate redundancy, aggregate costs would be lower, and the cost to each university would also be lower. This equation paid off for Stanford. We developed about 20% of the original Sakai code base, which meant that we received 80% of the product in return.

I am very pleased to be able to share an important update with the Sakai community regarding the ongoing efforts to create a flexible migration path from Sakai 2 to Sakai 3. I have been blogging recently [1] [2] about the development of a new Basic LTI widget for Sakai 3.

A .zip file with Keynote, PowerPoint, and NeoOffice versions of slide templates for the 2010 Sakai Conference in Denver are available for download <2010SakaiConferenceSlideTemplates.zip>.

Last week we kicked off a new project to bring the next generation of Sakai software, Sakai 3, to full production release. I'll post information about the project in formal channels. In this forum, I'd like to share my thoughts about the effort.