Lois Brooks's blog

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.

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.

When we started the Sakai project in late 2003, our goals were primarily economic. Along with our colleagues at Indiana, Michigan and MIT, we at Stanford wanted to collectively create a single course and collaboration software that we could all deploy on our campuses. We were quickly joined by other schools, most notably UC Berkeley, as active development partners. The first couple of years were hard work, more than any of us had anticipated, and it was through sheer perseverance that we were each able to do our local deployments.