Thanks Patrick and Michael for adding worthy points. I’m in complete agreement about where the discussion should be, but unfortunately I still spend a lot of my days in the discussion as it still is.

The meme that sparked off my post was the appearance (in another forum) of a “pros/cons” matrix for Blackboard 9, Sakai & Moodle that I think oversimplified the issues a bit too much, but nevertheless appeared to be at least a start of a large institution’s evaluation process. One of Moodle’s pros was “market share = 10%+”, while the respective market share’s of Blackboard and Sakai were not listed as pros or cons. When I questioned that number as a small part of a longer post that attempted to shift the discussion to a different place, I was told to take a look at Moodle’s published statistics. So I did, and this post was the result.

Further discussion revealed that the 10%+ Moodle market share number came from consultants, based on Campus Computing data—which I would argue is helpful as background information, but far from giving us clear pros and cons of any choice for any specific institution. Clearly, some folks out there are looking at data like Moodle’s published statistics, Sakai’s heretofore scanty self-reporting, and things like Campus Computing to help guide their evaluations and choices.

My larger point here is not to continue debate in the bean-counting mode, but to question whether the continued publication of statistics the way Moodle does it is actually getting in the way of more productive discussion/evaluation.

Based on thinking I’ve done as a result, I would actually counter Mathieu Plourde’s suggestion above that Sakai include a “call home” function (like Moodle’s?). I think that function is part of what generates all that Moodle data that clouds, rather than enables good discussion. Instead, I would like to continue the ongoing collaboration in the Sakai community to provide more fulsome profiles of institutions using Sakai, along the lines of the generic model we started at OpenedPractices.org. The main goal would be to give folks a way to find peer institutions (like Mathieu wanted to do, but had difficulty doing) so they can engage in more productive information exchange about their evaluation and choices.