We are switching the web site to use Sakai - Nate Angel asked the following question:
Second: on the decision to move the Sakai website into Sakai. Can we discuss a bit before we make this move? I spend a bit of time on websites in my day job and I don't really find Sakai to be the right tool for a public-facing website at this stage. While I love my own dogfood, I'm also a fan of the right tool for the right job.
Nate - I have moved this discussion to the web group on collab - join if you like.
We can discuss it - but at some point we need to make a decision. Using Sakai of course has many disadvantages as we can well imagine. And we could delay this forever with discussion - but now is a good time to make the switch with the webmaster transition.
Here are the pros:
(a) One less server to maintain
(b) Since it is Sakai we can involve the community in the editing and maintenance of the content. Since we will share server space and account space with collab.sakaiproject.org it will be very easy to permit community members to edit content on the site. We have never gotten community involvement in the web site in Mambo.
(c) We do not have to maintain/train a separate IT staff to maintain/upgrade/patch the web site software - Sakai is a small IT shop - the more we can reuse skills, talent, and people the better - the less we need to keep separate pools of talent that we need to replace on turnover - the better off we will be.
(d) The way we did the Sakai site previously was *very* expensive because we had so much replication.
(e) Using Sakai allows us to trivially expose things like the dev list or a document library of the QA group under s tab. Folks do not have to put things two places.
(f) Eating your own dogfood is good - even in our initial tests - we are finding and fixing little rough edges in Sakai - this will be a benefit for *any* organization that wants to make their gateway page richer. We can fix stuff very quickly because we own the code base.
Frankly, we have not been using much of the Mambo features at all - for example - I asked for a document library about a year ago and there is just not the right software in place - Sakai solves this trivially.
Also, our current site is overly complex - if you look at sites of peer organizations you will see a relatively simple graphic layout and navigation -on our current site, folks can never find what they are looking for. Sakai is quite capable of replicating a decently designed navigational structure in a top-quality look and feel. Our current navigation structure has evolved organically over time with repeated PHP hacks. I think applying a little discipline to navigation and information architecture to our website is a good thing. I also think that at times less is more. Look at peer organizational sites and see how simple they keep things for new users in particular.
We will maintain the site using the wiki to edit most of the content and iframes to display the content - you have not yet played with the anonymous workgroup portal in Sakai - but it can create a wide range of navigation structures. You can even add sub-sites and breadcrumbs. I expect that the site will ultimately look as nice as any other site on the net.
For me - unless someone steps forward with a willingness to commit do the work for the long term - I am not likely to reconsider the decision.
Frankly - I would far prefer to have intense discussion about the information architecture of the site - that is what matters the most - what software underpins the site is a trivial detail IMHO. Under "WG: Sakai Foundation Website" in the wiki - there is already some brainstorming notes about the information architecture of the site - lets try to work out what the right structure for the site should be.
Just more notes - I had a problem with the build putting the pluto-portal-driver-config.xml file in the wrong directory.
cd dev csh new-apache.csh cd ~/dev/pluto-1.1/ svn checkout https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/portals/pluto/tags/pluto-1.1.3 pluto-1.1.3cd pluto-1.1.3/
rm -r ~/.m2/repository/org/apache/pluto/mvn install
mvn -DinstallDir="/Users/csev/dev/apache-tomcat-5.5.20/" pluto:installcd webapps/pluto/WEB-INF
mv ../pluto-portal-driver-config.xml .
Someone told me about this:
http://www.chally.com/enews/powell.html
This is based on a magazine article and later a book titled: The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell.
I need to keep this as notes. Pretty sweet.
Craig L asked - a great question - how to communicate Sakai on campus?
Here are some resources:
A presentation from the recent Amsterdam conference on just this topic (Look under attachments)
http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/CONF07/A+Methodological+Framework+for+Evaluating+and+Selecting+an+Open+Source+LMS
We need to get you the audio if possible - that would be helpful.
Here is a video about Sakai in general:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/media/2006/overview/overview.htm
From this page you can download a high-quality copy of the talk in
case you want to show it locally.
This is a PowerPoint where I cover a broad overview of Sakai:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/talks/2007/sakai_overview_v12_hawaii.zip
This is also a great "Sakai Introduction" PowerPoint from Anthony Whyte:
http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/download/attachments/45506/Amsterdam_20070609.ppt.zip?version=1
Also there is a two page overview handout at:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/papers/2006/2006_08_two_pager.pdf
I know you said you did not want to do a features bake-off - but if you change your mind, take a look at:
www.edutools.org
If you are interested in getting a quick overview of the community around Moode and Sakai - take a look at www.ohloh.net and explore both projects.
If you are interested in communicating the notion of community source in general - take a look at these:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/talks/2007/2007_05_01_educause_keynote.ppt
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/papers/2007/educause_v01.doc
You are welcome to reuse/adapt ay of my or Anthony's stuff to help make your case - it is all available under creative commons.
This is my first use of iListen. Since I have a broken finger and am unable to tiny quickly I purchased iListen as an experiment. Before purchasing iListen I purchased a copy of IBM ViaVoice for Macintosh. When look down the package it said they're only supported Mac OS 10.1 and MacOS 10.3. I just assumed that would also work on Mac OS 10.4. When I came home and did some research on the Internet I found that IBM ViaVoice indeed did not support Mac OS 10.4. So I got in the car and drove to the Apple store in Grand Rapids Michigan the purchase a copy of iListen because I have the 6000 page paper that it's due by Tuesday.
So as a test I figured that I would enter a block entry using iListen. They say that the first thing to do it is to work on informal speech such as email and other things before you try to actually do serious writing about is what I'm doing. So far it seems as though it's about 85 percent. It only gets about half of the sentences right. It does get least three quarters or more of the words right. But even with the mistakes it is far superior to typing with one hand. Because I can always use the mouse with one hand to go back incorrect incorrect words. I simply go back and highlight the incorrect word and then say again.
So far even though I have only trained at for about ten minutes it seems quite accurate the end it quite pleased with it. it important to watch as you speak because sometimes if you speak to watch him and try to go back and understand what you said when it has misunderstood your words you have no chance of figuring out what you actually said. it does work better if you speak deliberately the with a brief pause in between words.
It has this bad habit at least in TextEdit when you go back and highlight word and re-say it of putting that word in capital letters. Perhaps I'll find a preference that solves this problem.
To compare this with the last time I used voice recognition it has improved significantly. The last time I used voice recognition was about three years ago and all I really remember is it made me so angry that I wish that the software understood curse words to mean delete the last word that I just said.
Join the Sakai community for a little bit of Karaoke tonight (Wednesday). We will be congregating at Casablanca which is located just north of the Red Light District, within walking distance to the hotel. The concierge can tell you where it is on the map.
Casablanca
Zeedijk 26e
06-12200519
The club opens at 20:00 with good Jazz, and Karaoke beings at 23:00 and goes until 3:00.
I just upgraded to Final Cut Express 3.5 - they changed LiveType's install process to *require* 9GB of textures, etc - just to work. Sheesh!
In earlier versions Livetype installed low resolution proxies for thes files and only installed hires versions for the files you needed. What were the developers thinking when they removed this very nice feature.
I cannot afford 10GB on my laptop that I use for video editing and all the rest of my work. The net result is that I will simply stop using LiveType. Drat.