Mike Kruckenberg has posted several updates from the Sakai Winter 2004 Conference:
- What’s New in Sakai 1.5?
- If you want to develop Sakai Tools
- Sakai Tools Team Update: Style Guide Overview
- Implementing Sakai in a Community College Consortium
Of these four posts, I find the last two to be the most interesting/revealing. The style guide sounds outstandingly comprehensive, with a lot of attention to detail regarding good UI design that you just don’t see in enough Open Source projects (and that you hardly ever see detailed at all in Open Source documentation). And the fact that they provide tools for wireframing the UI in Visio or OmniGraffle is unheard-of. This makes me very happy.
Regarding the community college consortium, apparently a group of 48 colleges got a $2.5 million grant from HP to migrate to Sakai. My question is this: Is $2.5 million a lot of money or a little? At first blush, it sounds like a big number. But divided evenly among the schools, it would come to a bit more than $50K/school, i.e., not that much. What I’m trying to back into here is the resource hurdle that small colleges have to overcome to play in the Sakai game. It’s worth noting that this consortium is not just installing the vanilla distro; they are actually building a lesson authoring tool that Kruckenberg seems to think is fairly elaborate. That could be good news for those who worry about the complexity of Sakai development, but I don’t really have the expertise or perspective (or enough details) to make a judgment.
Also worth noting is that the tool will apparently be released with Sakai 2.0. While Kruckenberg doesn’t make it entirely clear whether the tool will be included in the official 2.0 distribution or just put into the SEPP partners pool, it sounds like the former rather than the latter. If so, then that is again good news. The Sakai team has stated that they wish to evolve a more open governing process after they release, but so far I haven’t seen any evidence that they have a plan for this fleshed out. If they are indeed already moving tools from the edge core then this would be confirmation that the current project leaders are serious about open governmance, even if they haven’t had time to work out the details yet.
Speculation, speculation. If anyone out there actually attended this conference and has some details, please post them as comments or trackbacks.
Too many assumptions are made here…
The grants that I was awarded by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, on behalf of Foothill College, were/are “development” grants to build tools and enhancements upon Sakai (primarily to close gaps between Sakai and our legacy system ETUDES) that address our CA CC e-learning needs. The Melete lesson builder closed one of the gaps for our user community, for example. No funding was given for Sakai implementation costs. The consortium, ETUDES Alliance, that I manage, covers its own operational, hosting, and support costs.
We have made great progress with our migration plan to ETUDES-NG, our Sakai brand. All member colleges will be migrated over by June 2007.
Hi Vivie,
Thanks for revisiting this post. At the time I wrote it (late 2004), Sakai was significantly more opaque to me than it is now. (I read somewhere not too long ago about Albany Medical College implementing Sakai on a shoestring budget; I’ll post the details if I can find them.) At the same time, I appreciate your setting the record straight.
While we’re on the topic, I would imagine that more data regarding Sakai implementation costs will become available in the next two years. It appears that there’s been a significant uptick of pilot installations for the 2005-2006 year, possibly because many institutions were waiting for 2.0. If this is correct, then we should see more full-blown installations in 2006-2007. Hopefully people will publish information about their experiences, including costs.