In the rush to Sakai 2.0, two Sakai developers quietly laboured along with the world on their shoulders - Anthony Whyte and Lydia Li. A week after the cathartic Sakai 2.0 release, the eyes of the Learning Management world and the Sakai Project would be on Sheffield, UK watching to see which systems and applications would *really* interoperate at the IMS Tool Interoperability Demonstration.
Like many scary stories, the tension and pressure leading up to the climatic event simply magnified the happiness that everyone felt when it turned out that the story has a happy ending and the LMS's and tools interoperated happily ever after.
This is an exciting development for Sakai and for IMS. By focusing on developing code first and letting specifications folow the code development we ended up with something that worked pretty quickly (using the Glacial Standards time scale).
This effort really demonstrated the value of IMS where commercial and non-commercial, large and small organizations can work together for a common goal of making the market better for the customers and for all of the vendors.
The question of course is how to top this - that which does not kill us makes us stronger. Here is my suggestion. Imagine a set of publishers (O'Reilly, McGrawHill, Addison Wesley, etc etc) walking around with e-cartridges on USB memory sticks, and loading identical E-Cartridges into Sakai, Angel, WebCT, Blackboard, and (yes) Moodle.
You may say "impossible"... That is how I felt about IMS Tool Interoperability back in September.... And it turned out very well.
While everyone was 110% committed to the project, there are a few people whose dedication and commitment really formed the backbone of the project. These accolades include: our fearless leader Kevin Riley, Vishal Prashant of WebCT, Dirk Herr-Hoyman, and Bruce Barton of Wisconsin.
In essense Vishal and Bruce really were the tip of the technical spear on the project - they would work very hard and solve a problem and then lead the rest of us through the minefields.
That said, everyone worked very hard, and because there was so much effort by so many organizations is why this was so exciting.
Take a look at http://www.dr-chuck.com/media/ - the top item is the report from Alt-i-lab. I am going to try to do more of these little video vignettes as we go forward.
Whew!
What a wonderful meeting. We had 400 people - there are about 10 sites intending to bring up a significant pilot in September. I have a feeling that helping these people will be a major effort for us over the summer - perhaps more important than any development that we might do.
I really liked the second day of the conference which was exclusively focused on BOFs, Working Groups, and Discussion Groups - I did not have time to go to them all - but it was great to see the non-grant members taking an increasing leadership role. When the grant expires in December - we will all be "non-grant" members :).
It became really clear to me that the structure that we have during the grant will not scale to 200 developers. This meeting was the beginning of the organic development of the new leadership structures in the project. With all organic processes we will have to see how it develops - I for one am really optimistic that this will work out well.
It was personally exciting for me to talk publically about working with Moodle, PHP, and Web Services. A year ago, I told folks that we needed to "get some stuff done" and Web Services was going to be way too distracting. Thank fully our community has had some patience and with the Kernel 2.0 rewrite web-services became much easier to implement. So while web-services is just a infant feature in Sakai 2.0, it is a beachhead that can be used as a starting point.
Another amazing thing was Brian Berendorf of the Apache Foundation speaking. As far as I was concerned, we should record every single word he said and make them our bylaws :). Increasingly as I am forced to think about governance, copyright, contributor rules, etc for Sakai - I just turn to ASF and realize that they have it all figured out.
However there is a difference between Sakai and Apache going forward. Because Sakai is a end-user product and not a pice of infrastructure there needs to be more coordination w.r.t. release dates, packaging, QA, etc etc. The stakeholders of Sakai cannot afford to leave the quality and timelines for the product to chance. So - they pay some money (only 10K). With that we have a board to insure the money is invested wisely. We elect the board. The folks who pay the money elect the board. The board gets 10FTE to glue it all together while an ASF-style volunteer merit-based posse does the major development work.
The next six months of the project will be very excisting as the transition to a foundation begins and new leaders step up and new forms of organization are tested and evolved.
Now if we can only get the 2.0 release out by Wednesday so I don't have to shave my head again this summer.