community source
Sakai Product Council
by xolotl | 17 November 2009 - 1:39pmAs significant new features emerge from research and development projects in Sakai they can be incorporated into an official Sakai release. In May 2009 the Sakai Foundation established the first Sakai Product Council to help structure the process of these new capabilities emerging in Sakai.
Sakai Foundation
by xolotl | 17 November 2009 - 1:37pm
Ann Arobor
Michigan
The Sakai Foundation is a member-based, non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation engaged in the collaborative design, development and distribution of open-source software for education, research and related scholarly activities. It encourages community-building between academic institutions, non-profits and commercial organizations and provides its members and others with an institutional framework within which Sakai projects can flourish. The Foundation also works to promote the wider adoption of community-source and open standards approaches to software solutions within higher education.
Community Source Evaluation Strategies: Why Commercial Support Is Key
by xolotl | 10 September 2009 - 9:36pmJosh Baron, Director of Academic Technology and eLearning at Marist College and now the new Sakai Foundation Board Chair, recently posted a great article in Campus Technology detailing Marist's nuanced evaluation of Sakai and its community source provenance: Community Source Evaluation Strategies: Is Sakai Right for Your Institution? The article is a must-read for anyone at an institution considering the adoption of a learning environment—open/community source or proprietary—as all of Josh's lessons pertain to both options.
I'm especially glad to see Josh include "Functionality Requirements" as only one of Marist's five important evaluation criteria categories, putting it alongside Support Requirements, Community Health, Reliability/Scalability, and Innovation Drivers. All too often I've see institutions focus primarily on functional requirements in their technology choices, often at the expense of wise, strategic decisions that Marist's other categories take into account. Every system will leave you with functional gaps...it's the other stuff that will matter most in the end.
Reading through Josh's piece, I was also struck by how the structures of commercial support for open/community source underlie each of Marist's evaluation categories, and how well Sakai's robust commercial ecosystem helps buttress Marist's case for choosing Sakai. I'll briefly cover each category below.
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