Daily Archives: April 23, 2018

Sakai Community Leadership Update

By now, you know that Neal Caidin will no longer be our full-time Community Coordinator as of April 30, 2018 because of a reduction in Apereo membership revenue for Sakai. We still have funding – just not enough for a full-time coordinator. We will miss Neal’s smile, talent, and tireless dedication to our community.

http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/2018/04/sakai-coordinator-funding-in-2018/

The Sakai PMC, Sakai Commercial Affiliates, and Apereo Board have been coordinating on how to fill the roles that will be left open when Neal leaves. I attach a draft of a document we have been developing that looks at the community leadership roles in general that are currently filled by Neal and others.

We will fill these roles by a combination of volunteer leadership and by paying for time. Some of these roles are 20 hours per week and so we will use Sakai membership money to fill them. Here is a list of the people who will be leading us in these roles going forward; where we have a lead / back-up in the position, there are two names:

  • Community Facilitator: Wilma Hodges (Longsight)
  • Release Manager: Matthew Jones (Longsight)
  • Branch Manager: Matthew Jones (Longsight) / Earle Neitzel (Longsight)
  • QA Lead: Dede Hourican (Marist) / Jolie Tingen (Duke)
  • A11Y Lead: Tiffany Stull (Virginia) / Terry Golightly (Johnson)
  • I18N Lead: Miguel Pellicer (EDF)
  • Security Lead: Miguel Pellicer (EDF)

At this point, we have worked out an arrangement with Longsight to cover some of Wilma’s and Matt’s time taking on the Community Facilitator and Release Manager roles. The terms of the arrangements have been shared with the Apereo, the Sakai PMC and all the Sakai Commercial Affiliates. The PMC is making these appointments for 3 months and will review these roles August 1, 2018, and then formally consider others who might be interested in these roles.

The other roles are not directly compensated at this point, so we should thank those who have taken on this leadership as volunteers–as well as others who are not currently listed but are already part of our community leadership. To provide some support to these volunteer leaders, the PMC will retain some of the Sakai member funds and make them available to help with travel and other necessary expenses if a person’s organization is not able to cover them in the individual’s volunteer role. This will not be a lot of money but we feel that it can be very helpful in ensuring that our volunteer leadership makes it to meetings, conferences, and events.

The PMC will monitor the costs of these new approaches and make adjustments over the coming months, including additional compensated roles as finances permit. All funds that are spent will be done so in the open within the PMC and all of the Sakai SCAs. The PMC chair will report a summary of the expenditures around community support to the whole community quarterly.

You are welcome to join the PMC public mailing list to watch this happening more closely if you are interested and want to participate.

https://groups.google.com/a/apereo.org/forum/#!forum/sakai-pmc

Our goals in this staffing activity is to end up with Sakai community leadership that is both broad and deep and can handle turnover in these roles. We want to encourage involvement from all of our SCAs if they have interest.