I answered a Brian Jorgensen e-Mail proposing a Community Roadmap – he also has a Blog entry about it.
http://www.moosetrout.com/braindrain/sakai-community-roadmap
This is my answer. While I liked the basic idea – I very consistently am negative when something smacks of a “community driven management layer” – where some group appoints themselves to “be in charge” and drive all of Sakai to be “deterministic” as if we were a set of non-volunteer developers.
Sakai is a federation and we need to accept that – it is simply reality – all the fantasy of us as a company is not there (until we get to 2-3 million of revenue annually).
Once we have 2-3 million in revenue, then we will become a non-profit development company where the paying community has *every* right to have all kinds of checks, balances, determinism, and detailed reports.
But then, folks should look deeply into whether they want the community to *do* the work or delegate the work to a single organization (The Sakai Foundation).
To operate as a real federation where there is true respect for each organization that is in the federation – we must accept that each of those organizations (and individuals) will self-determine to some degree.
Freedom has a price – it is taking responsibility for ones *own* actions and respect for the actions of others.
Daily Archives: November 23, 2006
Foundation Staffing Levels
In preparation for Atlanta, I am trying to characterize the level of effort that it takes to run Sakai right now and who was doing the work to make “Sakai happen”. A lot of these people work pretty quietly so I want to recognize their contributions.
It totals over 15 FTE this point, 3/4 of which is volunteer and 1/4 of which is paid.
I will revise this list and improve it so this is best thought of as a draft.
If I have missed something – please let me know. If you are an institution with a FTE commitment working on the Sakai Core, a Sakai Tool, or Sakai QA – please drop me a short describing the work and give me %FTE in a note so I can add these other contributions to my lists. Do not include the staff it takes to keep Sakai running at your institution – only those who are working on Sakai itself.
These percentages go up and down – I tried to estimate the contribution levels over the past year. Sorry if I over or underestimate these contributions – feel free to correct me.