This is a guest post by Lucy Appert, a nominee in the 2010 Sakai Foundation Board of Directors election. Her bio and platform are available here.
Sakai in Three Years
The key question for our community to answer right now is, “What is our end goal?” If it is thousands of institutional cul-de-sacs within cul-de-sacs, we are getting there by default – and we could get there with the proprietary walls of commercial solutions just as easily. If our goal is the desire I hear expressed from faculty and students every day of integrating a variety of external tools and facilitating inter- and cross-institutional sharing and collaboration, then we need to think and work differently over the next three years.
The metaphor of a utility strikes me as useful here. “Utility” implies standards and stability on which or alongside which other layers of infrastructure can be built. One vision of the academic technology of the future, one that I hope to see realized in Sakai OAE/Sakai 3, is that there is a base utility into which individual institutions integrate their internal systems and activate customizations without altering the functionality of the base. For some institutions, those integrations may be the customized experiences of Sakai 2 tools operating in hybrid mode. Whether it is Sakai 2 tool stability or the Sakai OAE platform, however, developing and maintaining that base utility will require a strong structure and process.
Steps We Must Take
This utility metaphor has been used a lot (and with some trepidation) to describe what both Facebook and Google offer users, but using it to describe the open-source products developed by a nonprofit academic foundation has a certain naturalness. However, those products must be backed by a trusted foundation and organization with the power to create and maintain product standards. I believe we are at a point where development and oversight is best done within a common project that takes into account the broadest set of institutional needs and offers a plan and a process for maintaining it over the long term.
That does not mean the treasured Sakai “do-ocracy” must go away, but rather that the spirit be re-directed toward local integrations and customization selections on the one hand, and the development of a sound, flexible, receptive platform on the other. Facebook and Google have become utilities because they offer a standard, scalable, pleasant user experience that has been visionary and flexible enough to respond to social and technological changes. A common platform is the best way for us to achieve those goals with Sakai products.
Challenges and Opportunities
Building that platform is hard. It means looking at new ways of working together, ceding local control at times, and trusting in the end goal of the collaboration. It means an end to an overriding philosophy of “I’ll make it for me, and if anyone else can use it, great.” While that approach might be helpful in the short run, in the long run it harms everyone. I get my custom experience, but others have to tailor their uses to what I’ve built. There is the very good chance that other institutions will find that tailoring too onerous and will instead build their competing versions, thereby vastly diminishing any chance of cross-institutional work or common integration solutions. And what future possibilities am I cutting off within my own institution by building only to such narrowly focused specifications?
Sakai is a popular choice with academics because it is open-source. But that can only get us so far. If we do not also offer a good user experience and an innovative vision, it will not be long before people give us lip service but pay for the kind of technology they really need and enjoy using.
Our challenge AND opportunity lie in creating the structure and process as well as the product. My experience in attempting this type of project both within NYU and in the larger Sakai OAE/Sakai 3 project suggest that the process will be iterative, deeply collaborative, and dependent on the input of multiple perspectives to be successful. And in undertaking it, our community will be embodying both the spirit of our open-source product and the academic culture we hope it will facilitate.