Sakai Europe in Valencia

It seems ideal, in this my last blog entry as Sakai Executive Director, that I get to write about the European Sakai Conference that took place last week in Valencia. This is the third time I've visited Valencia and, as many of you know, it has become a city that I heartily recommend for a family vacation. I've gotten to know the good people at Universidad Politécnica de Valencia fairly well and it was fantastic for me that I was able to say some of "goodbyes" in person and in a place that increasingly feels familiar to me. But this is about the conference, not about me.

The conference was very well attended (between 80 and 100 folks) with Sakai folks from around Europe although with a largest concentration from Spain. It took place in a series beautiful new buildings on campus which were a bit hard to find (the first time around) but were an excellent venue for the event.

Aaron Zeckoski and Anthony Whyte kicked things off on Monday with a developer's workshop. It focused entirely on Sakai 2.x. I attended only the morning session and then spent the rest of the day recovering from jetlag by giving Nate Angell a tour of the city. Valencia truly is a beautiful place, with a great mixture of old and new, a vibrant cultural scene and even a beautiful beach.

The next morning the conference opened with a brief welcome from the Vice Rector and myself (my slides are on Slideshare). The sessions were excellent and you can find many of the presentations on the wiki page for the conference. I couldn't see everything, of course, but a few things stood out:

• A great overview of LMS usage in Spain by Mª Paz Prendes Espinosa of Murcia. She also outlined their evaluation process that eventually led them to choose Sakai over Moodle. They built a great website that showcases a lot of their material and provides a map of LMS usage across Spain. One of the lessons from this presentation is that many people are using Moodle because many other people are using Moodle, not necessarily as a result of a formal evaluation process.
• Nuno Fernandez and Feliz Gouveia of University Fernando Pessoa presented an interesting student supervision tool that they are currently prototyping. It looked like it would have broad applicability. I hope they'll post their slides soon on the wiki page for their session.
• The folks at Samoo did a great session on integrating web conferencing tools with Sakai. Again, I'm looking forward to their slides. I was particularly intrested to see there are several open source tools  that are gaining maturity that will give the Sakai community great flexibility. Already there is a Contrib space dedicated to Big Blue Button.
• And, of course, my final presentation which focused on Sakai 3. I made a call to the European Sakai community to engage immediately with a localization trial for Sakai 3. The Sakai 3 team, consisting mainly of Americans and Brits, needs feedback soon to make sure the localization "architecture" is addressed from the beginning. While we native English speakers may have good intentions, we know that we'll make mistakes without help from around the world.

One of the things that emereged for me was the clear establishment of a strong Spanish Sakai community. With Lleida, UPV, Navarra and Murcia committed to Sakai and several other universities piloting, the Spanish Sakai community will be a strong contributor. I visited Murcia on Thursday after the conference and I have great hopes that, once their transition is successful, they will make substantial contributions. Murcia is known for the strength of their IT department and they are moving from a home-grown system that very much resembles Sakai. Look for them on the lists.

Overall, it was a fantastic conference. From the basketball game organized by David (I think my legs are still sore) to the fantastic closing lunch I think everyone had a great time. I know I did. I saw some "old" friends and made some new ones. I hope we'll be able to stay in touch. It was a great end to my tenure as Sakai ED, so many thanks to the folks at UPV, especially Aris, Raúl, Jaime and David.