I gave an off the cuff speech at the recent K12 summit (http://k12open.fi.ncsu.edu/). I could not use PowerPoint (gasp). So I wrote some notes.
Pictures start here.
My speech notes start here.

What is Sakai and the SF
– Open source Collaboration and Learning Environment
– 2.5 years old
– 200 sites approaching a million users
– Active in Standards like IMS
– Member supported non-profit $1M / year – 105 members
– Volunteer developers
– Apache like commercial friendly license
– RedHat like commercial affiliates
Issues in Successful open source governance
– Value and protect those who make commitment and those who do the work for the common good
– Arrange motivation arrows so they lead toward contribution
– Need diversity of community- developers, designers, users, teachers, etc. Geographic diversity – Higher Ed, Community College, K12, lifelong education
Multiple models of approaching Open Source
– HE direct – HE indirect through vendor
– CC indirect
– K12 likely will be indirect because of nature of the market
How to Contribute
– Developer, QA, design requirements, sharing experience, participating in communities of practice.
– HS can contribute – may be QA, bugs, requirements
Sakai to teach Software Engineering
– VA Tech already in doing this at grad level – moving toward undergrad
– Sakai is like a worldwide 100 person mid-cap tech company that operates in the open – like watching an ant farm
Keys for K12
– Need to create and promote success stories – must over invest up front and not give up.
– Must improve packaging of Open Source software
– Standards and interoperability a must
Misc points
Redhat did not invent O/S – they showed how to profit from O/S by adding value without ruining the O/S community.
Tom Rabon: Collaboration is the heart and soul of open source.
Passion + Curiosity trumps IQ
“I would rather be collaborating” – T-shirt
The “Y-axis of the stack” is “value” – it is different for different verticals. For developers it is power and convienence, for games, it is frames per second, for higher education IT – it is innovation, for K12 education is “out of the box integratability.
Notes on Bob Suter.
It is hard to define “open” – it is easier to define things that are “imperfections” in “open”.
It usually comes down to when you will be told “no”. Do you or your organization have to pay *anything* to play?
Can you see all the conversation?
How do decisions get made?
Final panel – K12 Low Hanging Fruit
My notes start here. This is the low hanging fruit note.
Open Source SIF Agent for Sakai
Find existing K12 Sakai deployments – find use cases which were solved and make sure to get them back into the main Sakai release.
A really simple cut down distribution of Sakai that installs for small production in 20 minutes on commodity hardware commonly available in K12.
Work with K12 publishers to see if Common Cartridge can be used to get content into the hands of teachers.