e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Lois Brooks

  • 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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  • Michael Korcuska Moving On, Lois Brooks Stepping Up

    Update: Lois Brooks now has a blog post up about the transition as well.

    Well, I’m sad but not surprised to report that Michael Korcuska has been wooed by an organization with deep pockets to take on a very important role. The founder of LinkedIn, who is apparently a personal friend of Michael’s, invited him in for an interview and the inevitable happened. He was offered a job as their global head of customer operations, with a deal that was too sweet for him to turn down. Michael will be departing as Sakai’s Executive Director as of March 15th. The announcement is here and Michael’s poignant blog post about it is here.

    We are very lucky that Stanford’s Lois Brooks has agreed to step in as interim Executive Director. As you may know, Lois just finished serving her second term on the Sakai Foundation Board and has been an instrumental force in Sakai’s development from early on. We are lucky to have her leadership to help ensure that the transition is a smooth one.

    Sakai has made great strides during the three years of Michael’s tenure. During that time, project development communications and coordination have vastly improved, quality assurance has taken huge strides, teachers have taken a much more central role in the Sakai community, and the future of the platform has brightened considerably with the start of the Sakai 3 project. Michael had a hand in all of those improvements. Sakai—both the project and the community—has grown tremendously under his leadership.

    Michael, you will be missed. But, thanks to the great work that you and the community have done over the past three years, Sakai is going to be just fine.