Sakai Paris 2008: The State of the Union

I think we are on schedule for my original prediction that Sakai will show “real progress” in its released product within 12-24 months of the Amsterdam conference. In particular, the release after this coming one, which some in the community are beginning to refer to as “Sakai 3.0″, represents several steps down the road of an ambitious refactoring of Sakai with all the right priorities in mind. If the community pulls it off, I think Sakai will look very different—and better—going forward from 2009.

Now, another half year later, I am more confident than ever. Version 2.5 has been released and shows some significant incremental improvement. More importantly, the next releases (it’s beginning to look like Sakai may have both a 2.6 release and a 3.0 release being developed concurrently) will have very substantial–perhaps even radical–improvement. And the community is more vibrant than I have ever seen it.

Let me walk through the same categories that I used in the previous posts in this series:

• Commitment to transparency: Over the past year, the community has successfully executed on their commitment to make sure all major decisions are made on the listservs so that conference attendance isn’t required to participate in them. All listservs are open to non-members (and have been for some time now), so anyone can see and participate in the day-to-day operations and decision-making process. Also, the Foundation has done an increasingly good job of giving the community detailed reports of its activities. (Real Video recordings are available for the Sakai Foundation Update conference session as well as the Q&A with the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors.) In some ways, it’s fair to say that Sakai’s transparency exceeds that of the Moodle community, which is complicated somewhat by the Byzantine structures of Moodle.com and the workings of the partner relationships.  Work is also underway to revamp the Sakai web site and clean up the wiki. After all, openness is great in principle but not very useful in practice if you can’t actually find the information you’re looking for.
• Increasing sense of ownership from non-developer stakeholders: This is the first Sakai conference I’ve been at where participation of teachers didn’t need to be framed as a problem to be solved. They were just there. I saw a number of good, solid pedagogy presentations, including fantastic presentations by the winners of the Teaching With Sakai Innovation Awards (again available in Real Video). Kudos, by the way, to IBM for sponsoring the award. Two of the featured speakers, James Dalziel and Diana Laurillard, both talked about pedagogy, not technology or licenses or patents or what have you. And as for participation by usability folks, I’ll have quite a bit more to say on that below.
• Openness to change: If you want to get a sense of this, watch the video of the Better, Faster, and Lighter Sakai UX presentation. This is a must-see for a variety of reasons, including that it is one of the keys to the future of Sakai as a platform. But I bring it up here because the presenters are proposing a fairly radical shift in the Sakai development model, and it was embraced enthusiastically by the audience. (The room was packed.) Any trace of insularity or dogmatism that the community may have once had appears to be gone. It’s also a more international community, by the way. I don’t remember what the conference attendance numbers were (maybe somebody from the Foundation will post them as a comment), but I seem to recall the numbers being somewhere between a quarter and a third of the attendees were from outside North America. You may not be aware, for example, that Sakai has about 28% of the South African higher education market as measured by enrollments.
• Commitment to usability: The video I referred to in the last bullet point shows how the Sakai community will suddenly have the technical capacity to bring about very rapid improvement in usability, after several years of relative statis and serious lingering problems. This is not theoretical capability, by the way; Cambridge is going into production with this code change by the end of the month and there is a strong likelihood that it will be present in both the 2.6 and 3.0 Sakai releases. (In fact, it is one of the defining characteristics of the 3.x branch.) But beyond this technical capability, there is some excellent practical redesign going on. Check out Nathan Pearson’s presentation on Sakai’s UX Improvement initiative. (Nathan is a Sakai Foundation employee whose focus is user experience.) And, of course, there’s the Fluid work, which is starting to make its way into Sakai development and whose influence should grow increasingly large over the next two years.
• Commitment to release quality: Sakai has made substantial progress in improving its quality assurance, thanks in part to the hard work of Megan May. (Megan is a Sakai Foundation employee who focuses on QA.) There is also an effort to take on what I can only describe as open source load testing. I’m really not a QA guy so I can’t speak to the details, but my sense is that this Michigan-led effort will improve the community’s ability to do high-quality testing distributed across the resources that are available across the various participating institutions. (Again, further details or clarification from the Sakai community would be welcome here.)
• Commitment to standards support: Sakai is now a leader in standards support in many ways. The Java Content Repository (JCR) standard, or JSR-170, is fast becoming a core component in Sakai. Unicon just released integration code (in cooperation with Oracle) for the IMS Enterprise v2, a.k.a. Learning Information Services, standard. calDAV support is well along, I’m told, thanks to the efforts of Georgia Tech. Sakai has also been a pioneering partner for testing IMS Learning Tool Interoperability, via Chuck Severence and his Google Summer of Code project. (This builds on earlier work by Chuck and Anthony Whyte.) This is a sampling, not a comprehensive list.

Beyond all this, you’ll want to go back and give a close read to Ian Boston’s guest post on Sakai and OpenSocial. While it’s too early to be certain, there’s good reason to believe that this will end up being not just an experiment by one institution but another core element in what will become Sakai 3.x. Add all this up and what you get is a platform and community with a strong future. I believe that we will start to see evidence of this future in the larger marketplace within the next 12-24 months.