Reporting of Sakai installations to the Sakai Foundation, whether pilot or production, has been not only voluntary, but self-initiated and cumbersome to boot. Someone has to realize that they could report deployment data for their institution, then has to figure out where to report, get a Jira account to login and fill out the information. Pure inertia and perceived low-priority would lead to under reporting. Mathieu’s “call home” suggestion would be nice from a data collection standpoint, but any kind of automated reporting, however well intentioned, may seem a bit “Big Brotherish”.

Instead, maybe the Sakai installation process, or initial run could invoke a voluntary registration application that would as a minimum ask for the institution name, pilot/production status, (pre-fill Sakai version #), and an admin/security contact. This approached is used by many commercial applications. This approach not only would encourage the user to initiate a deployment record that could be subsequently fleshed out, but the Sakai Foundation then would have on record a contact should we need to notify institutions of a security patch for example.

I think the best approach to collecting deployment registration should be: make it obvious, make it easy, and show a benefit to the user.