e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Sakai Foundation Board

  • The Future of Sakai: My View

    As a member of the Sakai Foundation Board, I have at least the appearance of conflict of interest in any analysis I write about Sakai. That’s why I encouraged Phil to write his own, independent analysis of the recent developments around Sakai OAE. I was happy to support him as one source for the article but not as editor. In fact, in keeping with his previous coverage of the Sakai OAE woes, Phil did not show me his post draft before he published it. This is as it should be. We strive for objectivity and independence here at e-Literate.

    But now that Phil has done his work, I would like to offer up my own personal reflections on the current state of the Sakai software and community and where they could go from here. In the process, I will do my best to make my relationship to the project clear.

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  • Sakai Board Platform — Josh Baron

    This is a guest post by Josh Baron, a nominee in the 2010 Sakai Foundation Board of Directors election. His bio and platform are available here.

    Challenges and Opportunities

    As I look toward the horizon I see challenges, but believe that these also represent opportunities for Sakai, both the product and community, if the right strategic path it charted.

    The Challenge and Opportunities of a Two Product Community: The Sakai Open Academic Environment or OAE (the system previously known as Sakai 3) represents a bold step towards evolving not just Sakai but more fundamentally the LMS/VLE as we know it today. At the same time, thanks to the work of many dedicated community members, we are ever increasing (to barrow a phase from Dr. Chuck) the “awesomeness” of the Sakai CLE (2.x). This parallel effort are both evidence of our community’s core value to seek out and drive towards innovation, but also poses challenges with regards to resources, communication and governance. How do we (the community) organize the resources to maintain two products over the long term? How do we talk about our two products to those considering adoption? How do we move the “managed” project that the Sakai OAE represents today to a more “organic” development model over time? Although these parallel efforts raise challenging questions, they also represent a tremendous opportunity to affect not only change in the LMS/VLE market space but to fundamentally transform teaching, learning and research in ways that help academia meet the many challenges confronting it over the coming decades.

    The Challenge and Opportunities of Sustainability: Like many of our institutions, Sakai is now operating in the “New Normal” of shrinking budgets and rising expectations. Whereas institutions 3-4 years ago, some who had not even adopted Sakai, became members of the Foundation as means to demonstrate support for the concept of open-source, few have this luxury of resources today and as a result we have seen revenues decline. We, as a community must now justify the “value proposition” for becoming a member of the Foundation which is a challenge to an organization that is based on principles of openness and inclusion. At the same time, the realities of the “New Normal” hold the potential to drive us and our colleagues in other open-source higher education communities to consider new alliance that a few years ago may have not been considered priorities. A tangible example of this opportunity is the Sakai-Jasig alliance that was recently announced, which- I believe, will lead to a more sustainable future for both organizations.

    The Challenges and Opportunities of OER: I believe that the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement represents the next “grand experiment” in open-source development and will bring both tremendous opportunity as well as challenges to Sakai, as well as academia as a whole. The ability to share, remix and redistribute open educational content (e.g. courseware, journals, instructional software, etc.) within Sakai could transform education as we know it; freeing instructors from endlessly re-venting content, dramatically reducing costs of instructional materials and facilitating self-directed learning that could empower a new generation of students. Achieving this will require addressing technical, coordination and adoption challenges related to bringing OER materials into the Learning Management System. Although these challenges are far from trivial, the values we hold as a community position Sakai well to play a leadership role in making this opportunity a reality.

    Sakai in Three Years

    As I look to the horizon, I see a new era in the history of the higher education open- and community-source movement; an era in which a suite of innovative and mature software “built by education, foreducation”, encompassing everything from infrastructure to application, will exist. This mature “open”software stack will allow us to leverage and support the Open Educational Resource movement instrategic ways; providing our users with robust, rich and re-mixable content and an infrastructure tocreate powerful new learning experiences with it. The benefits, if realized, could go well beyond Sakaiand become a global transformative force in education.

    More specifically, over the next three years I believe Sakai will have demonstrated a new approach toproduct transition with institutions introducing, through “hybrid mode”, the new capabilities found inthe Sakai OAE gradually and based on user needs and desires. This model will be in stark contrast tothe traditional vendor “big bang” approach of “sun-setting” a product on their terms rather than thoseof their clients. I firmly believe that the Sakai CLE will continue to mature and compete strongly in thetraditional LMS space while at the same time we will see the maturing of the Sakai OAE and the initialrealization of its potential to transform teaching, learning and research. The Sakai OAE’s transformativepowers will be derived from the core design values it has embraced, many of which are outlined in the Learning Capabilities Design Lenses. These include its support for “openness” in all of its forms, supportfor academic networking, and rich collaborative content authoring capabilities.

    Beyond the future of our products, I believe our community will continue to grow and mature, boththrough our internal processes as well as through our plans to merge with Jasig. Today we have severalemerging new governance structures, including the “managed project” model being used by the SakaiOAE Steering Committee and the newly formed Technical Coordination Committee (TCC). Theseapproaches to self-governance will mature to become established community practices that will help us manage the development challenges that we will face as a multi-product community.

    Steps That We Must Take

    As I’ve outlined above, the road ahead is filled with both challenges and opportunities. To realize ourpotential over the next three years our community, with strategic leadership from the Foundation and Board, will have to address a number of key issues.

    Foremost for the Board is the need to ensure that we have a long-term sustainable financial modelfor the Foundation and our products. On a strategic level, I believe this will include the need to formalliances across other open-source initiatives. Whereas some alliances may be along the lines of thework going on to merge with Jasig, others may be lighter weight and more focused on shared servicesand/or alignment of missions. For example, forming an overarching alliance among the majority ofopen-source communities could create a single point of contact and reference for institutional decisionmakers and allow us to speak with one voice with regards to the value of open source. Such an alliance would not, in my mind, involve a merging of projects/initiatives nor an effort to bundle our products “ala” a proprietary vendor model, but instead simply represent an aligning of our message and missionsacross projects.

    On a more operational front, which is the clear domain of the Executive Director and Foundation staff,we will need to seek new models for membership. This may include, for example, approaches whichencourage membership among those institutions hosted by Sakai Commercial Affiliates as means tomaintain and possibly grow the revenue stream for the Foundation. In addition, we need to work toreposition the “value proposition” for institutions on the benefits of becoming members. This mightinclude the introduction of things such as new awards programs, (e.g. best new implementation thisyear,) for which only member institutions and commercial providers are eligible.

    Last but not least, the Board and Foundation must work to facilitate the maturing of community-drivengovernance models. We have learned from the past few years that the introduction of governancestructures from the “top down” have not been successful, yet expecting the community to self-organizewithout support or encouragement has also been an issue. I would like to see a new approach in whichgovernance issues are identified by the community with the Foundation staff then providing necessarysupports to help the community move to address them. The Sakai OAE’s “managed project” model maybe a good example of how this might happen as the Foundation Executive Director is now serving asco-chair of the Steering Committee with the Foundation helping to facilitate certain financial and legal tasks.

    Final Thought

    As we travel the road ahead we will be faced with major challenges including how to sustain, govern andcoordinate our community efforts. We will need to seek new solutions, from alternative funding modelsto alliances with other communities around shared services, values and common needs. I believe thatmy experience and passion for Sakai strongly positions me to help chart the course toward a futurewhere Sakai transcends our software and community; a future in which our efforts have revolutionizedacademia as we know it today. Though this task is a tremendous challenge, it is one I am prepared forand confident I can contribute to through my dedication, knowledge and leadership.

  • Sakai Board Platform — Nate Angell

    This is a guest post by Nate Angell, a nominee in the 2010 Sakai Foundation Board of Directors election. His bio and platform are available here.

    Challenges & Opportunities

    The greatest challenge we face in the Sakai community is how our collaboration can stay healthy and relevant in a time when numerous forces are rearticulating not only educational technology, but education itself.

    Before Sakai first started—not even that long ago—centralized learning management systems (LMSs) were not necessarily considered crucial in higher education, as they still are not across K12 today. Since that time, most higher ed institutions have recognized that offering enterprise online learning platforms is crucial to their missions. In the interim, we formed Sakai to enable us to develop and support such central platforms on our own terms.

    Yet today, the now well-accepted idea that an educational institution should offer a single, centralized learning technology platform is under a variety pressures to evolve, including:

    • Nimble, specialized technologies with compelling academic capabilities appearing and disappearing nearly daily.
    • Large commercial technology companies offering seemingly costless platforms for collaboration, research, and thought work.
    • Students, faculty, and researchers finding more reasons to reach outside institutional and pedagogical boundaries.
    • More people customizing, hacking, and developing their technology tools.
    • Data generated by teaching, learning, and research calling out for and flowing in to a wide variety of new uses.
    • People increasingly accessing online technologies day and night from multiple devices in far-flung locations.
    • Educational institutions reinventing their activities to meet changing cultural and economic patterns.

    These same pressures—and more—challenge the Sakai community, our practices, and our technology to evolve as well. To meet this constellation of challenges, I believe we in Sakai need to understand them as opportunities for our continued engagement, not as threats against which to raise our defenses. This positive attitude is not unfamiliar to the Sakai community: we rose together out of just such engagement and apply it daily to our work with each other. Sakai exists not merely to support what we have now, but to bring our collective energy and effort to develop and own what we need tomorrow.

    Sakai in Three Years

    My vision of Sakai three years from now can be summed up in a single word: growth. Not just growth for growth’s own sake, but growth along many dimensions.

    Part of that growth should be new people and new institutions choosing Sakai and adding their ideas and resources to our collective endeavor. We set out to help educators take control of their own technology destinies. If we are not bringing that gift to more people, then we are not fulfilling our founding goal.

    Yet successful growth is not measured only by adding more names to the Sakai list. We also need to grow what Sakai can offer: our continuing work to open Sakai to other technologies via a variety pathways, to sustain multiple technology projects of our own, and to partner with complementary communities already demonstrates our progress down this path.

    We must also measure growth by how many ways we offer to engage in our vision. Sakai has come far beyond our deep, enterprise technology roots to include more players on our stage. We now count technologists of many stripes, instructors, designers, accessibility experts, vendors, policy-makers, and more among our ranks, all hailing from widely international locations and organizations of every shape and size. New efforts are underway to reach out to students, to professional organizations, and to new policy- and grant-making bodies to further expand our constituencies. By continuing to become more, to more people, we ensure our work does not atrophy, losing touch with what matters.

    Last, but not least, we must continue to enlarge what is possible with Sakai. While we have a commitment to support the activities we already have underway at our organizations, we also have the tradition and the mandate to support activities that go beyond. The continuing novelty of what our work so far makes possible should inspire us to further work that in turn generates possibilities we can’t yet imagine.

    Over the next three years, we should continue—and stretch—these trajectories, until we truly grow to become not just the community that supports a technology called Sakai, but a community called Sakai that supports technologies for education, and all that can mean.

    Steps We Must Take

    The Sakai community must focus on three, interrelated activities to meet these challenges, grasp our opportunities, and lead us to where we want to be three years from now.

    First, a very tangible, yet crucial activity: ensuring the continued health and effectiveness of the Sakai Foundation itself as a coordinating body. The unique governance structure of the Sakai community is one of our most valuable assets. The Foundation is key to our distinction. Imagine for one moment Sakai without a sustaining—and sustainable—nonprofit foundation at its center: any positive vision we have depends on the ongoing vitality of this entity, dedicated to nothing other than Sakai’s success.

    Second, a governor for our growth: building and maintaining mechanisms to ensure that growth generates continuing common resources. By establishing a viable core platform and spreading its adoption, Sakai has demonstrated that this center of gravity will generate innovation and extension. We need to make sure that our growth also returns sufficient resources to support the less sexy, yet essential activities at our core.

    Third, a guarantee of our promise: establishing and maintaining quality and coherence in our products and processes. As Sakai grows, we need to build on our promise that our work not only meets, but exceeds the quality and coherence of alternatives. To date, we have achieved these measures only inconsistently. We need to institutionalize processes to bring new rigor to our work and meet the expectations we set for ourselves to stand at the front.

    I welcome further conversation about these ideas and my candidacy for the Sakai Board of Directors. You can read more of my thinking about Sakai on my blog at http://xolotl.org.

  • Sakai Board Platform – David Goodrum

    This is a guest post by David Goodrum, a nominee in the 2010 Sakai Foundation Board of Directors election. His bio and platform are available here.

    First off, I’d like to thank Michael Feldstein for his generous offer to the Sakai board candidates to present their perspectives in this forum as well as offer thanks to the many readers of e-Literate for their patience in wading through a discussion of board responsibilities, Sakai product directions, and open/community source approaches.

    I won’t repeat my background and basic platform, which are available here; and will try my best to answer Michael’s call to articulate what I see as the Sakai community’s challenges and opportunities, where I see both Sakai products and community in three years, and what steps we must take to get there.

    Challenges and Opportunities: that we face as a community and as part of the larger global education community over the next three years

    The larger global education community is living in interesting times: communication is increasingly instantaneous; technological capabilities leapfrog each other daily; social, economic, marketplace, and political changes are constantly upon us. And so the need for individuals to learn, connect, and be contributing members of intellectual as well as social communities grows ever more important. And the ability of our institutions to create an environment to enhance the success of students and scholars alike becomes ever more critical.

    The Sakai community is built upon the core values of

    • Higher education meeting its own needs
    • Our institutions maintaining control of their own destinies, and
    • Sharing the burden among like-minded partners.

    The opportunity for Sakai is to build on its current success of the Sakai 2 Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) and meet the future head-on, providing global vision and leadership for how technology can be integral to the success of the core academic mission.

    In my view, the biggest challenges for the Sakai community are to:

    1. Continue to build and evolve a shared vision for the future and maintain core values
    2. Deliver on commitments to always provide high performing and scalable products friendly to both users and developers, and
    3. Accomplish this with a lightweight yet strong Sakai Foundation that champions the most valuable contributions and the most successful self-organizing behaviors in the community.

    Sakai in Three Years: A vision for what Sakai (both products and community) should look like three years from now to respond to those challenges and opportunities

    Sakai Products

    A version 1.0 of a comprehensive vision for Sakai products has been recently articulated, at least from a teaching and learning perspective, with the Sakai Learning Capabilities Design Lenses. Michael Feldstein has previously written a  post about this work and invited me to write a post on the brainstorming and other community activities that led up to the version 1.0 document. It was very exciting to be a part of this highly collaborative work in the community and to continue to champion it in a variety of venues.

    I think it’s accurate to say the document is presented as a comprehensive product vision for both the Sakai CLE as well as the newly announced project called the Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE). Building on considerable advanced work on both the concepts and architecture for Sakai OAE, along with a hybrid approach to working together with Sakai CLE, the two projects are well positioned to deliver on the promise outlined by the Sakai Learning Capabilities.

    LMS vendors are always marketing their latest or refreshed versions developed in secret and pursuing technologies and/or market share by acquiring other companies or suing in the courts. Even the open source Moodle is poised for major change as it is now beginning to strategize and brainstorm for a total rewriting/refactoring of its platform (e.g., see this).

    The Sakai consortial values and governance affords us all a much deeper level of influence through a variety of tangible contributions to governance, direction, and products that uniquely meet the needs of higher education. In the next three years, Sakai is well positioned to provide an ecosystem of products, integrations, standards (e.g., LTI), and support that together can fulfill the Learning Capabilities vision.

    Sakai Community

    Simply put, my vision for the Sakai community is a house with all the lights turned on, occupied by multiple groups who are self-organized and board-recognized, and united broadly by common purpose and values. A lot of Sakai community accomplishments over time have occurred somewhat in isolation, pursued by a single institution, and difficult to find up-to-date information on.

    This seems to be evolving already. Both the Sakai OAE managed project and the Sakai 2 Technical Coordination Committee (as well as the teaching and learning community efforts on the Learning Capabilities Design Lenses) have been prime examples of highly visible, self-organized efforts within the community, each with multiple participating institutions.

    In three years, my vision is for a broader and more diverse Sakai community with a successful merger of Jasig and Sakai, more multiple-institution supported efforts, more higher ed institutions and commercial affiliates as members, and better outreach and communication of community initiatives overall.

    Steps We Must Take: specific actions that must be undertaken to fulfill that vision

    There are scores of actions and contributions the community would need to take to fulfill the vision I’ve outlined above. But let me focus on specific actions the Sakai Foundation Board needs to take.

    For Community Vision

    For the Foundation itself, I see several critical areas for thoughtful leadership by the directors through a dialogue with the whole of the Sakai community:

    1) Partners. Make mergers and partnerships with other community source groups an opportunity for both organizational efficiency and technical and functional collaborations. The growing open source ecosystem in higher education supported by partner commercial affiliates affords us all a strategic approach to continue meeting our own needs while maintaining control of our own destinies and sharing the burden among like-minded partners.

    2) Outreach. Implement an effective Sakai Foundation outreach strategy to a) institutions exploring learning management, portfolio, collaboration, and academic networking applications, b) potential commercial affiliates with services and application integrations that would benefit higher education, and c) other open and community source projects which together with us could create a rich platform for innovation.

    3) New Voices. Increase engagement with the newest members of the community, many of which are struggling to find their way among the myriad of projects, sources of information, dense lists of email, and potential ways to contribute. There might be a variety of ways to help with this; one idea would be to create a ‘new members council’ for new institutions and commercial affiliates. A new member would have a representative on the council for twelve months; the council would meet regularly with the executive director and other community resources he brings to bear to an agenda built by the new council membership. New members, no matter their size, should feel they have an established and direct line of communication.

    For Product Success

    For the Sakai software, I also see several critical areas of importance for the Foundation working with the community:

    1) Build and support a coherent product strategy. The Sakai CLE and the Sakai OAE (along with other community source projects) together provide the full range of capabilities needed in the demanding arena of higher ed online, hybrid and face-to-face teaching, learning, collaboration, and academic networking and community building.

    2) Turn the lights on. Formally recognize self-organized efforts within the community where multiple institutions are co-sponsoring and co-supporting specific, well-documented initiatives.

    3) Support and advocate standards. Adopting integration and interoperability standards would enable bringing together the best content, processes, and tools to support the academic mission of our institutions. As Feldstein has pointed out elsewhere, we need to integrate both the rest of the academic enterprise as well as the long tail of learning tools.

    Final Note

    As a board director, I believe I would bring a unique perspective:

    • The experience of having supported large and small campuses through an early migration to Sakai from a legacy system;
    • Substantial work with users as well as with development teams in continuing to move Sakai 2 CLE forward;
    • Early championing and participation in the Learning Capabilities visioning;
    • Involvement from the beginning in the Sakai OAE managed project;
    • Being a frequent conversant with institutions considering Sakai — some already leaning, others rather skeptical;
    • Understanding of how an institution can implement community source as a strategic direction; and
    • Leadership experience with sizable responsibilities for both teams and budgets.

    The opportunity to serve the Sakai community through a board position would indeed be a rare honor and privilege.

  • Sakai Foundation Board Nominee Posts

    Spotty hotel wifi permitting, I will shortly be publishing blog posts from most of the nominees for the 2010 Sakai Foundation Board election. A couple of the nominees have not responded to my offer. Given the time constraints involved, I don’t read anything into that. People are busy.

    Here are the details that I provided to the nominees in the email:

    What I’m offering is an opportunity for you to write one blog post that describes your goals and ambitions for the three-year period of your proposed first term as a Board member. Each blog post would have the following three headings:

    • Challenges and Opportunities
    • Sakai in Three Years
    • Steps We Must Take

    The idea, if it isn’t clear, is to (1) outline the challenges and opportunities that we face as a community and as part of the larger global education community over the next three years, (2) present a vision for what Sakai (both products and community) should look like three years from now to respond to those challenges and opportunities, and (3) describe specific actions that must be undertaken to fulfill that vision.

  • Sakai Foundation Board Elections

    Elections are being held this week for two open seats on the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors. You can see the slate of candidates here. Votes are due in by a week from today. In the interest of transparency, I have invited all candidates to blog about their respective platforms here on e-Literate. Time is tight, so I may not get submissions from everybody, but I hope to get as many candidates as I can to post. I feel strongly that voting decisions should be based more on just, “Hey, I’ve seen that person’s name on list a lot; s/he must be good.”

    As a sitting Board member myself, I feel it would be inappropriate for me to comment on individual candidates or even advocate specific platform preferences. But I do think it’s worth talking more about how to pick a good Board member in general. I invite members of the Sakai community—particularly past and departing Board members—to respond here in comments with your own suggested criteria, but here are some possible angles to consider when you’re evaluating the candidates:

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  • Sakai Blogging

    I have been thinking a bit about how my new roles on the Sakai Foundation Board and Product Council intersect with my role as a blogger. To be clear, I intend to maintain my independence on e-Literate. I will continue to praise other platforms when I see something praiseworthy, and to speak out when I see something in the Sakai community that I think could be better.

    That said, one way in which I might be able to usefully combine the two worlds is to use e-Literate as a platform for increased transparency into the Sakai community. There’s a lot going on that isn’t always obvious to many community members, never mind the general public. I’m going to do my best to bring some of these goings on to broader attention. And obviously, I wouldn’t be volunteering for the roles I’ve taken on if I didn’t believe in Sakai—both the software and the community.

    All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I will be posting more about Sakai going forward, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop writing about other platforms.