Six months ago, following the Amsterdam conference, I was highly encouraged by some of the signs of progress I was seeing in the Sakai community. In an exchange with a commenter on that post, I wrote,
The question I’m trying to answer in this blog post is, given these sorts of concerns, how much progress are we likely to see in the next 12-24 months? This turns out to be a difficult question to answer. How does one gauge the health and vitality of any community? My experience has been that an open source project can change direction and take off like a rocket, drop off a cliff, or drift aimlessly, and that this change of direction can happen with little advance warning to even careful outside observers. The leading indicators of a change in direction or velocity tend to be relatively intangible, having to do with the alchemy of the particular inter-personal and inter-institutional relationships that drive the project. They are subtle enough that you often won’t pick them up if you don’t hang around and observe over a significant period of time. For example, if I hadn’t been at the Atlanta conference six months ago, my impression of the Amsterdam conference probably would have been different (and closer to yours).
My observation as somebody who is not quite an outsider but not quite an insider to the community is that there have been subtle but extremely important shifts in the community dynamics. If I am right, then we should start seeing more tangible indicators of this change within the next 6-12 months and real progress within the next 12-24 months.
So, six months later, did I see “tangible indicators” of change? The answer is unequivocally yes.