I will be submitting this abstract to the 2013 Apereo Conference in San Diego June 2-7, 2013.

The Sakai project is nearly ten years old, having started informally in June 2003 and then formally funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in January 2004. There is no question that Sakai has brought tremendous value to the LMS market – even for schools that have never used or installed the product. Sakai has been a force for good and shown other LMS systems the right path to meet the real needs of their users. Sakai is the only Apache-style open source / open community LMS project in the marketplace. As of November 2012, Sakai represented six percent of the US LMS marketplace. These are all impressive results and with the release of Sakai 2.9, we have a product that we can be very proud of (and everyone should upgrade to it as soon as possible). But at the same time, we cannot rest on our laurels and need to think carefully about the kinds of activities that we will undertake beyond Sakai 2.9 to maintain and strengthen our place in the marketplace in an increasingly standards-oriented, component-based learning systems, trends toward multi-tenancy, software as service, MOOCs and extreme scalability. In this presentation, we will take a look at the past, present, and future of the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment.

This is just a draft – comments welcome.