I am just back from a trip to New Zealand and Australia. I was an invited speaker at the University of Auckland so they covered the expenses of the trip.
The trip was great – I got to sail on the ocean for the first time in my life with Scott Diner. The whole crew at University of Auckland is first rate – Scott, Stephen, janet, and the dev team – I learned a lot while I was there.
I also visited Charles Sturt and talkedwith Mark about the IMS Enteprise Provider – we came up with a nice design that leverages the IMS Enterprise work from Scott Wilson of CETIS – this wil be pretty neat. We decided to go ahead and do the current IMS spec after I talked with Linda Feng of Oracle and got the scoop on the IMS Enterprise Interoperbility demo for next year’s learning impact – we will likely extend IMS Enterprise a bit for the demo – so it is good for us to go ahead and implement the current spec for IMS Enterprise Services for Sakai at Charles Sturt.
Had a great discussion with the Instructional Designers at CSU and realized that I need to make some more PowerPoint about how to teach with Sakai.
I talked to Paul about many different architecture bits – we came up with lots of cool designs to allow some nice upwards compatibilities with their old system – the idea was to make a special tool called “CSU setup” with buttons that say “Add Subject Outline”, “Add Osais” and other CSU local links – put that in the worksite setup – this is a better approach than patching site setup as it allows for business rules.
I ran into some SOA folks as there was a Australia-wide SOA conference at CSU the day after I left – had some great conversations – showed them my new favourite ZapThink SOA poster. Talked a lot about my new slogan “Free the Data” and how RSS and iCal federation is the way of the future – and to think about the Web interface as the “fall back” interface.
Talked a lot about the role of Portals, JSR-168, JSR-286, and all of that stuff. Debated whether or not to rewrite their local perl-based five-year-old MyCSU portal – I suggested not to rewrite but to add a cool synoptic web services to Sakai that returns a cool Dom and then put some simple XSLT in their current portal. Sweet idea. Free the Data! Redo the portal later as a separate project and do it right – perhaps waiting for 286 based portals to appear. At least if you are rewriting – have a reason other than “we need a Sakai Dashboard!”
Later met with James Dalziel of LAMS fame. They are just about done with V2 – looks great – talked about RAMS, CORDRA, Shib, XACML, et c etc etc. This is some really really good stuff. Take a look at the CORDRA project – tres interestingvous!
Notes to self:
– We need to have a Sakaiproject starting page for project managers, developers, designers, and other folks involved in the project. We can call this the Sakai Intranet page – it compliments the Sakai Home Page.
– The Continetal Presidents Club in SFO has free wireless – Sweet
– Register the domain www.freethedata.org

Take a look at this picture:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/10/index.php?img=31-10-06_231808_02.jpg
This is James Dalziel (http://www.dr-chuck.com/media.php?comment=feed&id=59) of LAMS fame.
It turns out that Melete’s export format is a well-formed IMS Content Package with proper sequencing so that you can export content from Melete and import it into the LAMS 2.0 IMS Content Player and it works nicely!
This worked on the first try – I simply exported from Melete on my laptop – put it on a USB stick and James imported it into LAMS – Viola.
And we had a beer too!