Well the Sakai 2.2 release is out and it is a good time to core dump a few thoughts.
In a way 2.2 “completes” the work we started in the 2.0 release. Looking forward, we do not have any more “shoes to drop” as big as 2.0 and 2.2 releases. We can gracefully evolve Sakai without having to do major surgery for the next year or so. This should lead us to have at a 1-2 year period where we can focus on making Sakai better rather than having to “clear the decks” for a rewrite.
Frankly, we need to focus our energy on improving the end-user, developer, and deployer experience in Sakai if we are to truly reach our full potential. Brad Wheeler uses the term “user delight” – users should be happy to use Sakai.

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Two weeks back, I visited the Lleida in Catalonia – mostly to thank them for their internationalization work in Sakai 2.0.
I figured that I should write this up and share it.

Here are some pictures from the trip (sorry my photo blog is out of order because of the inconsistent delivery of SMS messages from Spain).
Neat Barcelona Architecture:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1256004.jpg

The Lledia Team:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1250003.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1257004.jpg

Eating Baked Snails – A Lleida speciality
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1257003.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1257004.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1257005.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1256010.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1256011.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1318004.jpg

Drinking San Miguel – A Lleida specialty
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1257007.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/07/index.php?img=22-07-06_1257008.jpg

You may not know the history of Lledia and Sakai – so I figured that I would write it down and share it.

The University of Lleida was looking for an open source course management system early in 2004 and was considering CourseWorks from Stanford University. When Stanford joined Sakai, Lleida turned its attention to Sakai.
Lleida evaluated the Beta release of Sakai in May of 2004 and was pleased enough to put it into pilot production. Since Lleida is part of Catalonia there was a need to translate Sakai into the Catalan language. The Lleida technical team did this work by locally modifying all of the text in the Sakai source code. This was completed and placed into production at Lleida. Lleida quietly continued to run with their modified version of the Sakai 1.0 Beta for over a year, giving support to 80 course sites and 200 students for the pilot.

During 2004, the Sakai project quickly went from a small effort to a worldwide activity. When Sakai 1.5 was released in December 2005, I made a list of what I felt would be the “impossible challenges” that I felt that we had zero chance of compling by Sakai 2.0. This was simply sent out in a spreadsheet to the development list. One of the items in the buried deep in the spreadsheet was generalized internationalization for Sakai.

Several days later I received this simple and direct message from Lleida:

On 12/13/04 7:25 AM, “David Barroso” wrote:
Hello Charles,

We, at University of Lleida, can do the internationalization
work for sakai 2.0.

We are very interested in it !!

When can we start job ?
Regards,

This started a three-month effort during which the Lleida technical team, composed of four developers (Alex Ballesté, David Barroso, José Garcia, and Carol Manchó) took the entire Sakai 1.5 code base, one section at a time, and internationalized the code. Then they prepared the English localization and Catalan localization as well. Each element was carefully tested and given back to the Sakai team for integration.

Beth Kirshner at the University of Michigan acted as the “traffic cop” for the process, making sure that the Lleida team was given the right versions of each section of the Sakai code, and then integrating the changes back into the Sakai source tree. This work was done in parallel with the massive rewriting activity and significant development effort of the Sakai team to produce Sakai 2.0.

Because there was so much rewriting going on throughout the rest of the Sakai code base, each element to be translated had a very small window of opportunity for success – so each time we handed a component to Lleida – they had to work at breakneck speed so as not to slow down the rest of the Sakai 2.0 development effort.

The team was able to maintain the fast pace and the work was completed in March 2005, in plenty of time to make the June 2005 release of Sakai 2.0. The Sakai 2.0 release was the first release of Sakai that was heavily used outside the United States of America and we were very fortunate to have Sakai internationalized for the Sakai 2.0 release.

Lleida as a campus is committed to open source across the board and is very willing to invest the effort to make open source a success. Nearly all of the desktops on campus run Linux and Open Office.

We lost dial tone at home. I tried everything – unplugged all the phones and fax machines – powercycled the alarm system and still NOTHING. No dialtone – not even a click – not even the kind of echo that you hear when you have a phone off the hook.
The phone line was dead. As if disconnected.
I was about to call the phone company and be a wimp – but then I noticed that somone had taken a phone wire connected to a wall plug and connected it into a free port on the 10/100 switch!
that was indeed out of the box thinking as a possible ereason why Internet would be down – but it made the phone system *very* unhappy. Unplugged the Ethernet switch from the phone jack and viola – all better.