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.
Let’s start with Jasig. Founded in 1999 as JA-SIG, or the Java Administration Special Interest Group, Jasig might be thought of very roughly as a higher education-specific analog to the Apache Foundation. (The Jasig folks might quibble on the details of that analogy, but as a first approximation for people who know nothing about the group, it’s not a bad place to start from.) It is home to prominent projects such as uPortal, the CAS single sign-on system, and the Bedework academic calendaring system. But rather than thinking of Jasig as a collection of techie Java projects, it’s probably more helpful to think of it as a community and Foundation that collect and share best practices around developing and adopting open source software that benefits higher education. Of the Mellon-funded family of software foundations, they are both the oldest and the closest in philosophy and outlook to grassroots open source (as opposed to the more centralized approach known as community source). Their community culture is also very much aligned with that of today’s Sakai community.
As I described in my last post, Sakai is now a two-project community, with Sakai 2 and Sakai 3 co-existing and complementary long-term development efforts. As Sakai 3 moves further away from the traditional learning management paradigm and toward a more open academic environment, it is likely that we will see more complementary projects developed by the community, such as a stand-alone loosely coupled grade book in the style that Jon Mott and his colleagues at BYU have envisioned, a collaborative annotation tool, or cross-platform, cross-institutional tag sharing tool. There are lots of possibilities. In addition, the community would benefit from attracting other open source teaching and/or research collaboration projects that aren’t Sakai-specific or even directly Sakai-related. For example, it would be great to have an official project to support a WordPress LTI plugin. Right now, there are lots of education-related open source projects, both large and small, established and prospective, that could benefit from being a part of a larger community. An organization that combines Sakai’s teaching- and research-focused community with Jasig’s long experience fostering diverse open source projects could create a home for both new and existing software development efforts while bringing new folks into the conversations we’re trying to foster within Sakai. Each project could maintain a good deal of independence and a project governance structure of its stakeholders’ choice, just as Jasig projects currently do and just as Sakai 2 and Sakai 3 currently do. But the collected wisdom and inspiration would be a benefit to everyone involved.
Further down the road, I think there’s a very real possibility that the merger of these two organizations (and it would be a merger of equals, not an acquisition of one by the other) would result in something like an integrated software stack for higher education. It only makes sense that putting these projects in closer proximity to each other would result in more integration. As part of that, I would expect to see a growth and maturation of the support vendor ecosystem. As these vendors are able to support a wider range of IT needs on campus, their businesses should become more diversified and stable, which would be good for everyone.
To be clear, this is not a done deal. What we have at the moment is more of a common goal than a common plan. There are lots of details to be worked out regarding finances, governance, and other important topics. Assuming the two foundation boards are able to come to an agreement on exactly what a merged organization would look like and how it would be accomplished, then a proposal would be put up for a vote by both communities. So this may take a while yet, and there’s always the chance that it won’t go through. But the sense of the joint committee was that there are no insurmountable roadblocks that we foresee and lots of upside potential for both communities. I will add that the chemistry between the two groups was fantastic. It has been a real pleasure working with the Jasig guys.
If this sounds interesting to you, and if you will be at EDUCAUSE next week, then I recommend you come to the community source reception, where both Sakai and Jasig representatives will be hanging out. Hope to see you there!
