e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Jasig

  • Announcing the Apereo Foundation Advisory Council

    Long-time readers know that I have had a close affiliation with the Sakai Foundation at teams and served on the Board of Directors relatively recently. This year, Sakai merged with the Jasig Foundation to form the Apereo Foundation. The purpose of the new organization is to become a sort of Apache Foundation of higher education in the sense that it is an umbrella community where members of different open source projects can share best practices and find fellow travelers for higher ed-relevant open source software projects. In this merger, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, last week the foundation just announced that the board of the Opencast project, which supports the Matterhorn lecture capture and video management project, voted to effectively merge with the Apereo Foundation. (The decision is subject to discussion and feedback by the Opencast community.) On the one hand, Opencast probably wouldn’t have joined the Sakai Foundation because they want to interoperate with all LMSs and wouldn’t want to be perceived as favoring one over another. On the other hand, had they joined Jasig prior to the merger, they would not have had access to the rich community of education-focused technologists that Sakai has to offer. (Jasig has historically focused mostly on tech-oriented solutions like portals and identity management solutions). The fact that the Opencast community is interested in joining Apereo is a strong indicator that the new foundation is achieving its goal of establishing an ecumenical brand.

    And in that context, I am pleased to tell you that I will be involved with the foundation in a more ecumenical role. Specifically, I will be facilitating an advisory council.

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  • The Death and Rebirth of Sakai OAE

    Last fall, when Indiana University, University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, and Charles Sturt University all pulled out of the Sakai OAE project, it looked like the end for the Sakai community’s next-generation platform effort. The vastly reduced project team, consisting mainly of Cambridge, Georgia Tech, and Marist College, went into quiet mode as they attempted to figure out what could be salvaged. Now, about nine months later, they have re-emerged with a late beta of a completely re-architected system, promising a 1.0 release in early July. They have also rebranded them project as Apereo OAE, named after the new organization that is the merger of the Sakai and Jasig Foundations, and signaling clearly that the project is not intended to be a successor to Sakai but instead is its own separate project with its own separate destiny.

    In retrospect, it turns out that the breakup of the grand coalition and resulting near-death experience may be the best thing that ever happened to the project.

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  • More on the Sakai/Jasig Merger

    As I have mentioned here before, the Sakai and Jasig foundations are in the process of evaluating a merger to create a kind of Apache Foundation for higher education. The new organization would be called the Apereo Foundation. The two communities will be voting on the merger some time in the next month or so. Documentation and discussion can be found here.

    I’d like to tell you why I think this merger is vitally important for higher education in general and Sakai in particular.

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  • The Sakai/Jasig Merger Plans

    After years of stasis and even atrophy, the educational technology markets are suddenly hot. New LMS players like Instructure are making major wins and market share is shifting rapidly across all the major players. Educational technology startups are sprouting up and getting funded at an unprecedented rate. Blackboard’s announcement of support for producing, discovering, and sharing OERs is the latest of a number of signals that the company is changing. Meanwhile, none of its major competitors are standing still either. Pearson’s OpenClass represents a bold and provocative vision that could upend the whole chess board. Then there are the nextbooks, forging a whole new product category. There was even a “startup alley” at EDUCAUSE for the first time. While rapid change brings about its own problems that we have to be wary of, all of this foment is, on balance, good. We are at an inflection point. The ecosystem is producing new ideas and new possibilities. I am a big believer in the forces of entrepreneurialism and consumerism as twin engines of progress.

    It is with all of this as a backdrop that I would like to explain why I think the recent re-affirmation of the Sakai/Jasig merger is more important than ever and why I have agreed to continue serving on the foundation board of the new entity when the merger is finalized.

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  • The Sakai/Jasig Merger Proposal

    You may or may not have seen the recent press release with the headline, “Jasig and Sakai Foundations to Pursue Merger.” It’s a big deal. I am on the joint Sakai/Jasig committee that put this proposal together, and I’m pretty excited about it. I’d like to fill you in on what the deal is and why, in my personal opinion, it’s a really good idea.

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  • Understanding Single Sign-On

    This is a little geeky, but if you’ve ever wondered what “single sign-on” really means in the enterprise space, Unicon’s Andrew Petro has a great ten-minute YouTube video explaining the concepts, specifically as they are implemented in Jasig’s Central Authentication Service (CAS):