I have resigned from the Sakai Foundation Executive Director position effective June 1. I have attached my resignation letter at the end of the blog post.
In the past four years, it has been an absolute privilege to be the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project and then the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation. This has been the dream job for me - for my whole career I just wanted to be part of something that has broad impact. I have truly enjoyed meeting all of you and working with you. We have explored Community Source together and found a way to develop software together with a team assembled from people around the world.
The University of Michigan has offered me a position where I can continue to be involved in the Sakai Community going forward and allow me to focus on technical aspects of Sakai. My travel budget will likely be much lower - so I will probably not come to as many of your offices as I have done in the past - and my photo blog will be more boring :)
Like most of my life, a partial explanation can be found by carefully reading some PowerPoint I wrote :). Back in December 2004 at a meeting in Phoenix Arizona, I gave a talk that puts my interests in Sakai in a very personal perspective:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/talks.php?id=38
This presentation tells about my life and career for the past decade and how I very badly wanted to be at the leading edge of innovation around teaching and learning - When this all started - I just wanted to be a teacher who could hack on my own fun solutions and have an LMS that would let me write a rich building block - see slides 9-15. You will see that for the last decade *every* single job change I made consistently allowed me to move to where the innovation is happening.
Interestingly in Slide 17 - 19 from 2004 - I point out where I think things should go - Content Management and Tool Interoperability
So now, with that trip down memory lane complete - my goals for the future are to get to the "3.0" place in Slide 17 - and I want to be part of the technical team that is actively building the solution.
For me the next few years will be some combination of these aspects:
- Continue to contribute to the core architecture of Sakai, focusing on JSR-170, Hierarchy, Bodington transition, and a move to RDF
- Continue to work on standards at the presentation layer. I have not given up on JSR-168 (yay for JSR-168 support in Sakai 2.4) and I have not given up on WSRP (yes even 1.0) - I am going to *make* WSRP work one way or another in Sakai - and yes it will even be useful and worthy to be run in production.
- Continue to work with IMS in the area of Tool Interoperability - For me IMS Tool Interoperability is the *most important* innovation for the next five years. IMS TI version 1.0 is a good start - but going forward I hope to have the time to invest in IMS TI 2.0 to make it truly transformative. This will require that I build and maintain a reference implementation of TI 2.0 and evolve and give feedback to the IMS process.
- I have always been interested in the research applications of Sakai - given my involvement in the NEESGrid project for many years - I would like to focus my energy on making Sakai really work well in research environments - I wrote an NSF grant called "Sakai Research Edition" talking about this a while back that some of you may have seen.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/papers/2007/2007_01_ci_summary.doc
- I also hope to do some teaching - I hope to teach both beginning programming and advanced programming - and of course - you guessed it - I want to teach project-style courses where all the students write in Sakai! And of course - I want to use Sakai to teach.
- I also will continue to be interested in moving Sakai towards Web 2.0 where it becomes a flexible set of services that can be used in portals, personal learning environments, and other mash-up technologies.
- I hope to write one or more books about Sakai If time permits - I hope to write a book about community source processes and then some technical books about Sakai - I have consciously scheduled some programmer and end-user tutorial sessions for me to teach over the next few months to force myself to produce training materials which can lead to a book or two. Then I can write the book for the class I teach (something I did a long time ago - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/hpc2/).
- I also hope to do some consulting around Sakai - I have seen lots of neat uses of Sakai and at times felt bad when I could not stick around to "help" as I was jetting off to the next visit. With a more open schedule I can be more deeply involved in a few selected projects working with Sakai.
I leave the Sakai Foundation in excellent hands - the team of Megan, Mary, Anthony, Mark, and Peter have done an outstanding job on the past few releases. We have pretty well established processes and practices. The Sakai software and community are also very strong and I am very proud of how far we have all come in three short years.
http://www.ohloh.net/projects/3551
http://www.ohloh.net/projects/4006
On a personal note, I might actually take weekends off for a few months. After four years of working almost seven days per week, I am way behind on little construction projects around the house and am way behind on my camping, off road motorcycling and ATV riding.
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/08/index.php?img=12-08-06_155318_01.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2007/03/index.php?img=18-03-07_142526_01.jpg
So you can see that I will be busy and involved in Sakai going forward. So much to do and so little time....
/Chuck
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I hereby resign my position as Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation effective June 1, 2007.
I want to thank the Sakai Foundation Board for the opportunity to lead this historic effort. Not only have we built a world-class collaboration and learning environment serving over a million users around the world, we have also demonstrated for the world a new model for software development – community source.
I have already discussed my future options and am pleased that the University of Michigan has a position for me that will allow me to continue my involvement in the Sakai community.
As I make this transition from Foundation employee to community member, I will of course assist the Board in transition issues, and in any other ways that advance the Sakai mission.
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Posted by csev at March 20, 2007 07:12 AM