I went to Bloomington, Indiana in December and with Marlon Pierce’s help, started working on the Sakai JSR-168 portlet again. A really great steak from Zagreb always gets the juices flowing – Marlon said I could not have any steak until I had an initial version done – so motivation was high.
Now four days later, I have an even better release with a bunch of usable features. I attach some PowerPoint and source for you to take a look at. Here is a set of new stuff:
– Added Gallery Portlet
– Added a tree view portlet that shows all of your sites and tools
– Moving the code into SVN (when I get a good network connection)
– Configuration flexibility
– Added proxy portlets for common Sakai tools:
Announcements (sakai.announcements)
Assignments (sakai.assignment)
Chat Room (sakai.chat)
Discussion (sakai.discussion)
Gradebook (sakai.gradebook.tool)
Email Archive (sakai.mailbox)
Membership (sakai.membership)
Message Forums (sakai.messageforums)
Preferences Tool (sakai.preferences)
Presentation (sakai.presentation)
Profile (sakai.profile)
Resources (sakai.resources)
Wiki (sakai.rwiki)
Tests & Quizzes (sakai.samigo)
Roster (sakai.site.roster)
Schedule (sakai.schedule)
Site Info (sakai.siteinfo)
Syllabus (sakai.syllabus)
This basically means that you can drop a Samigo into a JSR-168 portal after a few details have been handled.

These are some more Sakai principles that were discussed by a few other folks.

The Sakai Foundation Board directs resources that belong to the Sakai Foundation or have been given/loaned to the Sakai Foundation. With limited resources, the Foundation tends to focus on investments which build and sustain the community. The Sakai board also provides some support for community-wide design and technical activities like project management, release management and quality assurance in the best interest of the community.

Nearly all of the work of designing, developing and producing Sakai releases is done by volunteers. These volunteers may be individual contributors or may work for an organization that is involved in Sakai and is making a voluntary organizational contribution. That said, one of the Sakai Foundation’s goals is to inform and guide volunteers making contributions how they might maximize the benefit of their efforts for the entire Sakai community.

Sakai’s direction is driven by contributions from the community. In order for an organization to effect the direction of Sakai it is best done through contributing resources to that aspect of Sakai that the organization feels is important.

Sakai efforts are organized into a number of separate projects, roughly modeled after Apache. Each project has a set of committers who self-manage their commit list. Generally the path to becoming a committer in a project is for one to develop an understanding of that element of Sakai and begin contributing through an existing committer. Once it becomes clear that the new contributor has achieved the appropriate skill level, they can then be granted committer status. The Sakai Foundation Board delegates operational authority for appointing appropriate committers to the leadership of the technical community.

Sakai is software which must maintain 100% production capability over its entire lifetime. Maintaining the performance, quality and reliability of Sakai releases is the founding principle of Sakai software engineering.