Coordinating the next phase of Sakai 3

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.

There has been tremendous work already done toward Sakai 3, with active design and development at NYU, Charles Sturt, Cambridge, Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Indiana, as well as several other universities and commercial partners, which forms the basis of the new project. The new project brings together the existing body of work, and the existing teams, into a single, coordinated effort, and aims for a completed version that is feature-equivalent to Sakai 2 in mid-2011.

While there is a lot yet to be done, the work accomplished to date shows tremendous promise. Indeed, even as we ramp up the coordinated effort, Cambridge and NYU are each preparing a local deployment of Sakai 3 for use this summer.
Six universities have already dedicated resources to the coordinated effort: Berkeley, Cambridge, Charles Sturt, Indiana, NYU and Stanford, and this roster will grow in the coming months. One of the first tasks for the new project is to develop a structured project plan. We've hired Bob Benedict from Open Mountain, generously supported by Georgia Tech, to aggregate all the existing project information into a corpus, and to develop a project plan that encompasses design, development, and production readiness. We're moving quickly into the project, and will have the first drafts of the project documents available in late May. In addition to the core project team, there will be a lot of ways to contribute ideas and feedback, as well as to do complementary development and to help support the testing and release of the new tools. You'll hear a lot more about Sakai 3's composition and progress, and how you can get involved, as the project unfolds.

In addition to the work contributed directly to Sakai 3 development, credit for this work must be given to the community for Sakai 2. Our collective intelligence and effort has resulted in a robust and highly functional product used on hundreds of campuses today. The early innovation in Sakai 2 has led directly to our continued ability to envision and create new tools such as Sakai 3, and it is a testimony to the diversity and strength of the Sakai community that both products can be in active development and use. Sakai 2 is a terrific product that serves the learning management and academic collaboration needs on our campuses. It will be around for quite a while yet, and so even with the excitement around new ideas, we're continuing development on the product release of Sakai. I'll say more about this in a separate posting.

Over the past seven years, we've learned a lot about educational software, and even more importantly, about how to collaborate to design, develop and support this endeavor. As we ramp up the collaboration phase of the Sakai 3 effort, it's striking to me how facile the Sakai community is in working together. Just a one example of excellence in community-based development is the UX Working Group's prototype development and requirements definitions. This rich body of work delves into the users, and the actions they take in pursuit of their academic work, that informs the functions that will eventually manifest in software design. http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/UX/UX+Working+Group

I run the risk of shortchanging everyone else's effort when I highlight one piece of work, so want to reinforce how this facility in collaboration has permeated all aspects of the Sakai 2 and Sakai 3 work, whether it's in community based creativity, shared work, or in taking time to document or screencast work as it unfolds so that others can learn and participate.

There is a lot to say about Sakai 2 and Sakai 3, and as the projects progress I'll keep you posted on what's happening.