Communications activities

It was a busy December with projects targeting both the internal Sakai community and outreach to those who haven't yet decided to adopt Sakai. We got a lot done, but a number of these projects carry over into the new year.

• Sakai website - http://sakaiproject.org
  • We continue to enhance the site adding more video interviews and testimonials showing how Sakai is being adopted and used.
  • We are in the middle of a project to port the institutional deployment data from Jira, where it was hard to maintain, to the new Drupal-based website. Once that process is complete and we have a better user interface to the data, we'll ask everyone to review and update their deployment records, or if they don't have one, create a new one. Having up-to-date information will be a good resource for the community.
  • Folks seem to like the Twitter-roll on the News and Events page. Having a dynamic view of current discussions about Sakai is both compelling and informative. I'm exploring adding an additional panel using Yahoo!Pipes with feeds from different web 2.0 resources: blogs (including Planet Sakai of course) , Youtube, Delicious, Slideshare, and Vimeo) and putting that on the website homepage. You can see the work-in-progress at http://sakaiproject.org/sakai-feeds-0.
  • To keep an eye on website development see the Jira report.
  • Sean Keesler is helping port the previous OSP content to the new site so we should see more Portfolio information soon.
  • The Contact Us form on the website is being well used. We have had over 50 requests for help or information since Dec. 1 (and the traffic was pretty light during the holidays). I'm going to be combing through those requests and updating our New User FAQ to reflect current inquiries.
• Sakai wiki - http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF/Welcome and Mail Lists http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo
  • The wiki along with our mail lists are the life blood of the Sakai collaborative effort. It's big, it's complex, but that's to be expected for a tool supporting such diverse projects. There are currently 154 Confluence "spaces" including (69-Contrib projects, 20-Work Groups, 8-Discussion Groups, 25-Projects, 7-previous Conferences) and 29 Mail Lists. I plan to do some wiki and Mail List gardening this month, archiving some of the old un-accessed wiki spaces and unused mail lists. We'll keep back up archives just in case.
  • 15 of the mail lists are archived and accessible via Nabble (and accessible through the Sakai website http://sakaiproject.org/mail-list-archives. Nabble provides a variety of views, better formatting of the email, and best of all a full-text search across all the lists simultaneously. After some list pruning I will be adding the remaining email lists to Nabble.
  • I have started a Sakai Communications projects calendar http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/COMM/Home where you can keep track of ongoing marketing communications activities and special projects.
• Sakai Executive Brief and Newsletters http://sakaiproject.org/newsletters
  • We just published the second Executive Brief a couple weeks ago. You can download it and the previous one from links on the Newsletter page. We plan to publish these quarterly (except for the summer quarter)j.
  • We're planning an Executive Brief webinar January 21 (time and details TBD). This will be an opportunity for Foundation members to get a briefing from the Executive Director with expanded detail on Foundation activities, and a chance to participate in a live Q and A session. A recording of the webinar will subsequently be made available to the general public.
• Sakai Annual Conference 2010 - June 15-17, Denver
  • We're beginning to pull together the resources for this year's conference. This means forming the conference committee, confirming Track leads, getting request for proposals out to the community, bringing up the conference registration website, and last but not least getting ideas for the Denver Sakai conference logo! I'll be posting more information about these soon.