Nate Angellraised by wolves, accidental open-source evangelist

As a currently serving Sakai Foundation board member, I have been a close participant in the merger efforts between Sakai and Jasig, including participating in the joint working group on the merger with the Jasig board and being "elected" to be a part of the founding board of the new merged foundation, should it come into existence.

I have been supportive of the idea of the merger because I'm always looking for ways education can increase control of its technology destiny and leverage common resources. Because Sakai itself is evolving to be a multiproject organization (with the Sakai CLE and OAE projects), it makes sense to consider evolving our community further to support multiple projects, and multiple approaches to project success. As someone who has participated in the formation and maintenance of a number of nonprofit organizations, I especially welcome the idea that with such an umbrella organization, like-minded projects and communities might not have to form their own independent nonprofit organizations, a necessity that I have seen result in significant duplication of efforts and seems an inefficient use of our scarce resources.

While the somewhat different cultures and technologies of Jasig don't necessarily make it the ideal first partner for Sakai, I believe we have more in common than we have different. The merger investigation alone has started new collaborations and insights across our communities. With an expanded umbrella, we could shelter new partnerships of different types in the future with other like-minded open educational technology organizations (eg, DuraSpace, Kuali, Opencast, etc). We don't all have to merge, but we call all work more closely together.

As the merger has moved forward however, I have become less supportive of an immediate merger, only because I have seen it generate sufficient friction within the Sakai community that I believe could be a damaging distraction to other important work. Let's face it: everybody involved has more in common than we have different and we all have far better things to do to achieve our mostly shared goals than argue amongst ourselves. I hope to to see some more healthy, respectful, open debate in our communities before finalizing my personal viewpoint. I'm disappointed that some of those who seem to think the merger is important—both for and against—have not engaged in more public discourse on the matter.

I was inspired to propose and deliver a session titled "Sakai vs the World Wide Web 2.0: To Facebook or Not to Facebook?" for the recent Sakai 2011 conference in Los Angeles by the question below. While I write specifically of higher education here, I think the same questions—and perhaps answers—might be applied to any educational level or sector.

How is Sakai—or any online platform supported by an educational institution—relevant in an environment full of compelling web activities that engage our everyday lives? Does Sakai matter in the Age of Facebook, and if yes, then why and how?

I have been watching Instructure and it's move to offer part of its Canvas learning platform under an AGPLv3 open source license with great interest.

First, Canvas is a compelling product, with some great usabilty and features. I also welcome Instructure's move to a (forked?) open source path, which I think helps evolve platform options and the marketplace in useful ways.

I am unconvinced, however, by a main thread Instructure CEO Josh Coates takes up in his recent blog post on Instructure's open source strategy.

Josh says that software owned by a single commercial entity is preferable because "critical bug fixes, integration and innovation only come out of the folks that own the technology." I think history has shown that Josh's assertion is not true. Many open and community source projects that do not have a single commercial entity at their core consistently demonstrate high rates of maintenance, innovation, and integration. At the same time, what might be called "corporate" open source offerings do not always generate the qualities Josh describes.

Underneath this issue is an even more fundamental perspective that I also question: that there are only two paths of software ownership/development, which Josh defines in his question: "would you rather have a closed system owned by a commercial entity, or an open system not owned by anyone?" Josh goes on to suggest Instructure's open source strategy offers "the best of both worlds."

Recently, I was honored to accept nomination to stand for the Board of Directors of the Sakai Foundation, the nonprofit organization that coordinates the larger collaboration of the Sakai community.

Some people are confused about the role of the Sakai Board, which stewards the Foundation itself, not Sakai the community or Sakai the product. Our community and product both have a variety of other leadership and governance mechanisms: all open, transparent, and drawing their membership from the community based on merit and contribution rather than election. In short: the Board does not "lead" Sakai, but rather ensures that the Foundation is healthy so it in turn can coordinate—not lead—the real engine of Sakai: our community.

So before running for the Board, I had to stop and ask what I would want to accomplish in joining this body whose work might be seen as once—or even twice—removed from direct engagement with Sakai. My answer revolves around Sakai's characteristics as an open source project, and the role the Sakai Foundation and its Board play in maintaining Sakai's health and progress.

My thinking goes back to my earlier answers to the question "why Sakai now?" where I wrote:

Unlike any other proprietary or open source learning platform, only Sakai provides structured, open and transparent community and governance, powered by a substantial and growing number of institutions of every shape and size from around the world, coordinated by a formal, nonprofit entity, and including a strong and varied commercial ecosystem. We call this combination "community source" and it is open source, only much more.

I still hold by that statement, but recognize that it describes a very organic situation, constantly changing, filled with different forces pulling not always in the same directions. All the ingredients in Sakai's healthy mix are absolutely necessary for its continued success, but there is one crucial element that all the others depend on and can not do without—that central, shared entity that exists only to support everything else: the Sakai Foundation.

In addition to all the important work the Foundation does to coordinate community activity, perhaps its most important function is to serve as a conduit through which part of the community's growing resources circle back to empower common needs and goals. It is precisely this "virtuous cycle" that I would seek to strengthen if I were elected to the Sakai Board.

You can read my full platform statement on the Sakai Project website, and if you have not yet cast your ballot in the Sakai Board elections, I welcome your support.

I'm excited to preview the integration we've been working on at rSmart between Sakai and Google Docs. We expect to release this integration in the upcoming 2.7.1 version of our rSmart Sakai CLE distribution, and once we see it in action, contribute the integration to the broader Sakai community. Embedded here is a 7.5 minute demo of the integration that covers the basic functionality (you can also grab the fullblown movie). I've also attached an early case study rSmart produced in collaboration with Google on this functionality.

What makes this integration so cool is now Sakai users can harness the rich authoring and collaboration capabilities of Google Docs, and use Sakai to distribute their documents to other Sakai users, like students, classmates, or other collaborators. The integraton works with your personal Google user account, or if your institution uses Google Apps, your institutional Google identity.

This is a stellar example of all the new integrations we're seeing with the Sakai platform. Look to try out the integration yourself soon on rSmart's mySakai environment, where we'll turn it on once our 2.7.1 version is released.

I've long believed the open practices we follow in the Sakai community result in more, better, faster functionality, code, security, accessibility, standards-compliance, and innovation generally. But lately, evidence has been mounting to demonstrate the high value and wide acceptance of the open path more clearly than ever.

Today's announcement of a new partnership between rSmart and SunGard Higher Education (SGHE) to deliver and support Sakai is the latest manifestation of the huge body of valuable work being generated by those of us following the open path: commercial vendors, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, government entities, and individuals. Valuable work that is having real, positive effects on education.

A key part of rSmart and SGHE's work together is to extend Sakai's integration with SGHE's Banner Student Information System (SIS) platform to follow the latest IMS Learning Information System (LIS) standard. On the face of it, this sounds like a typical outcome of two technology firms working together, but that integration rests on a far larger body of work, produced collaboratively in our open community.

I'm trying an experiment with my daughters this week where I'm asking them to create a new project every day based on some simple ideas: they are participants, I am a very hands-off guide, they work together to do something worth while. They completed their first project today—Eat Your Yard—where they had to find edible plants in our yard, find/create recipes and build a dinner menu using them, and cook dinner. It occupied them the whole day and was a resounding success.

Feel free to use/modify the project I gave them below. I unveiled each new part only after they had completed the previous activities and we spent time while eating the dinner they made reflecting on the project and what we might do differently next time.

The girls sprung one welcome surprise on my plan: I was expecting them to find and follow existing recipes, but they instead created their own recipes from scratch. I'm encouraging them to record (at least) the more successful recipes, like the garden lettuce with basil and a lemon vinagrette, and the mango-apricot juice with blueberry icecubes.

Warning: While the project was largely self-propelled, cooking dinner took a full two hours with both 6 and 10 year-old chefs.

I was deeply honored to be named a 2010 Sakai Fellow—mostly because fellowship bestows a coveted black "ninja" sakaiger (pictured)—but also because I read my fellowship as evidence that the Sakai community recognizes and values all forms of contribution to our collaborative work.

Three out of 2010's six Sakai fellows have made their substantial contributions primarily in areas of actual technology development: Oxford's Matthew Buckett, Cape Town's David Horwitz, and Michigan's Gonzalo Silverio. I can't stress enough the high value and significance of these three fellows' work.

The other three 2010 Sakai fellows—Indiana's David Goodrum, Michigan's Steve Lonn, and myself—have made our primary contributions in what might seem "softer" areas of Sakai: coordination, communication, thought-work, and research. The very tangible outcomes of David's leadership in the formulation of the Sakai Learning Capabilities and Steve's continued focus on the invaluable research of Sakai's Multi-Institutional Survey Initiative are far better evidence than any of my own contributions of the value of work outside the Sakai codebase.

Unlike others who suggest a strong difference between what might be called the "write" and "read" communities within Sakai, I see this year's Sakai fellowships as testimony to my view that such a dichotomy is not so useful. Instead I see read/write activities in open communities as a continuum that generates a virtuous circle of outcomes: new reading generating new writing and vice versa, until the distinction between reading and writing becomes robustly fuzzy.

All of us in the Sakai community are readers and writers at different times, of different texts, inspiring and supporting our whole collaborative endeavor.

Thank you Sakai!

After the announcement of Google's CloudCourse being open-sourced, I decided to give it a try and see exactly what's under the hood...at the very least, it would give me a chance to try out a Django app via Google App Engine, which alone is worth the time.

Long story short: I got CloudCourse up and running in a matter of minutes.

Any hullabaloo that CloudCourse as it stands now is a serious contender to existing full-featured online learning systems like Sakai, Moodle, Blackboard, or Desire2Learn is premature. CloudCourse is at its root a scheduling and rostering application, clearly designed for the internal training needs it was apparently developed to serve. No educational institution will be migrating from their current LMS to CloudCourse any time soon.

After almost a year in existence, the Sakai Product Council that I was honored to join is completing a planned review of its configuration and activities. My answers to the common questions posed to Councilors and community reviewers are below, but before you dig in to those details—or maybe instead, if you're pressed for time or interest—let me sum up my review here as briefly as I can.

First, let me stress again that the formation of the Council is a very important step in Sakai's evolution and is part of what makes Sakai different from every other enterprise online learning platform available today. The Council represents a process for open, transparent, formal product governance by the community, for the community. This model is important both within the Sakai community, where we will benefit from the increased structure and governance, and externally, where potential adopters can see a community that truly controls its own destiny.

Second, I think the Council's form and function are largely correct, but need some adjustment. Read on for further details.

Third, I am not satisfied with my own participation on the Council or the Council's accomplishments generally. I think we can and should do better. I have made some suggestions below that may help make this happen, and have read other suggestions from other reviewers that may also help. This review is an appropriate and constructive step in the Council's evolution.