Well it is the end of summer, and then end of Integration week for Sakai 2.3 – probably a good time for a status report.
Focus on User Delight
With the 2.2 and 2.3 releases, Sakai’s framework is pretty stable. There is a lot of innovation in the area of tools going on around the world and we can have some time to take a breath and work on the “user delight” aspects of Sakai. I am working to increasingly put the focus of our thinking on the uses and users of Sakai.
The requirements effort has helped to communicate the “will of the community” to our volunteer development team – in 2.3 (8 weeks of development) there are a number of areas of the requirements that were addressed. As we move toward 2.4, we need to revisit the requirements and make sure that the will of the community is well represented in the requirements so that developers can address many of these requirements over the next four months as we prepare Sakai 2.4. Mark Norton has been retained to lead and facilitate the requirements process.
I truly enjoyed my visit to Lubeck University and the EU Sakai days. they produced video summaries of the meetings:
http://www.oncampus.de/index.php?id=819&L=1
From the discussions at the meetings, it is clear that Europe will bring many new ideas to how we all will use Sakai to teach and learn. The Bologna process:
http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/educ/bologna/bologna_en.html
may have a significant impact on the need to evolve the technology used in teaching and learning across Europe to meet these new EU requirements.
In my hobby as film maker, I am increasingly looking for “end user” Sakai stories to mix in with my Sakai developer stories. My first video in this new series is from Roskilde University.
http://www.dr-chuck.com/media.php?id=65
It focuses on how Sakai is used in and out of the classroom in a database class at Roskilde University taught by Henrik Bulskov.
Technical Bits
Summer 2006 was a pretty busy time for the Sakai community. We started the summer with the Vancouver conference. Sakai 2.2 was released in mid-July. With the Sakai 2.2 release we are moving toward a longer QA period acknowledging the increasing complexity of our product as we grow. To compensate fore this longer QA we have to move our freeze dates earlier – so the code freeze for Sakai 2.3 was moved up to mid-September.
So in the eight week period from mid-July through Mid September we were all pretty busy :). We released 2.2, we released 2.2.1, we released 2.2.2, we developed for 2.3, and code froze 2.3 – and of course for those of us in the northern hemisphere – we took August to prepare for the upcoming September production.
The good news is that we got it all done. The bad news is that folks are rightly tired after sprinting the whole summer. We need to pick it back up and do a good job on QA for 2.3.
The Sakai 2.3 release (even with about 6 weeks of development) is shaping up nicely. There are a lot of provisional tools integrated into the release and some nice cleanup in the portal, mail area, and the resources tool has some new features that came in through the requirements process.
Going Forward
For the people who have been involved in Sakai from early 2004, it feels for the first time that we can actually sit back and take a breath. It seems as though we have been sprinting for 2.5 years and now can finally sit down. This is a good time to move our focus from purely technical issues and look more broadly at what Sakai “should be” through our requirements process.
As of 2.3, we have adjusted the schedule so that we can be more relaxed. We roughly have four months of development, two months of QA, and release dates that allow 6 weeks of preparation for a January rollout and four months of preparation for a September rollout of a new release. This schedule shift resulted in a really short window for 2.3 – but it will help us greatly going forward.