In preparation for Atlanta, I am trying to characterize the level of effort that it takes to run Sakai right now and who was doing the work to make “Sakai happen”. A lot of these people work pretty quietly so I want to recognize their contributions.
It totals over 15 FTE this point, 3/4 of which is volunteer and 1/4 of which is paid.
I will revise this list and improve it so this is best thought of as a draft.
If I have missed something – please let me know. If you are an institution with a FTE commitment working on the Sakai Core, a Sakai Tool, or Sakai QA – please drop me a short describing the work and give me %FTE in a note so I can add these other contributions to my lists. Do not include the staff it takes to keep Sakai running at your institution – only those who are working on Sakai itself.
These percentages go up and down – I tried to estimate the contribution levels over the past year. Sorry if I over or underestimate these contributions – feel free to correct me.

Paid Staff – Focus on Coordination
Charles Severance – Executive Director – 100%
Mary Miles – Membership Coordinator – 100%
Anthony Whyte – Community Liaison – 100%
Peter Knoop – Project Coordinator – 80%
Megan May – QA Director – 50%
Brigid Cassidy – Conference Coordinator – 40 %
Mark Norton – Requirements Coordinator – 15%
Susan Hardin – Web Master – 25%
Institution Provided Staff – Focus on Coordination
Lon Raley – Finance – Michigan – 50%
Megan May – QA Director – Indiana – 50%
Pam Dietz – Finance/Support – Michigan – 50%
Kathy Riester – Conference/Support – Michigan – 30%
Aaron Zeckoski – Training – VA Tech – 40%
Tony Atkins – Server Support – VA Tech – 20%
Duffy Gilman – Server Support – Univ. Arizona – 20%
John Leasia – Production/Configuration – Michigan – 20%
Margaret Wagner – Newsletter/Web – Michigan – 20%
Crystal Hancock – Designs – Indiana – 20%
Stephen Marquad – QA Leadership – U. Capetown – 20%
Seth Theriault – QA Leadership – Columbia – 20%
Board Members That do Jobs that Staff Should Do
Chris Coppola – rSmart – Licensing – 15%
Joseph Hardin – Michigan – Patent/Legal – 50%
Brad Wheeler – Indiana – Licensing/Patent – 10%
Mara Hancock – Berkeley – Requirements – 15%
Institution Provided – Core Development Team *
Glenn Golden – Michigan – 80%
Ian Boston – Cambridge – 80%
Antranig Basman – Cambridge – 80%
Jim Eng – Michigan – 50%
Andrew Poland – Server Support – Indiana – 40%
Lance Speelmon – Release Manger – Indiana – 30%
Beth Kirschner – Internationalization – Michigan – 30%
Gonzalo Silverio – Skins/UI – Michigan – 30%
Josh Holzman – Testing – Berkeley – 30%
Clay Fenleson – Documentation/Release – Boston University – 20%
Zach Thomas – Import/Export – Texas State – 20%
John Ellis – Helper Tools/JSF rSmart – 10%
Joshua Ryan – Arizona State – 10%
Chuck Hedrick – Dav/Resources – Rutgers – 10%
* These are the people that are those people who are (1) either working on a foundation-assigned task, or (2) available to work on a foundation-assigned task. These are the people that have voluntarily made themselves available to take “on demand” tasks. Sometimes these tasks are to help someone out of a jam or a tight spot. At any moment, these folks are busy on something and can’t be instantly micro-reallocated – but in the long run they tend to work on cross-cutting issues.
I am sorry I don’t have the names/list of the people working on QA or tools – I will have those lists by Atlanta.
The common thread amongst the people on the list is that their local institutions/situations are stable enough that they or their management have made a commitment to work broadly across the product on cross-cutting issues and to let their agenda be set to a high degree by the Sakai needs rather than local needs. Perhaps the key metric is that they are highly skilled in Sakai and they have “spare time” and ask “how they can help?” and they are “cost-free” from the point of view of the foundation.
Developing these kinds of flexible resources is the key to long-term stability for Sakai – it is important task that I take very seriously. But I will be frank – these are jobs for which there is no training. You can’t just go to a two week class and become a “flexible” resource. The people on this list are by nature self-starters and self-learners and self-managed. They have an instinct about where the problems are that need solving. Usually all I have to do is give some simple, general guidance and these people figure out the problem themselves and then solve it. These are the kind of people that *any* organization would love to have on their team.
The most important way to extend this list is for people to have time – (1) time to look at and understand the product and/or code base from one end to the other and (2) time to concentrate on hard problems without being continuously interrupted by your “day job” and (3) time to actually take on and make progress on tasks that likely have little or no immediate value to your local institutions and do these tasks in a timely manner (i.e. there often *is* a deadline). My experience is that it takes at least six months of building expertise before someone can be part of this group.
The good news is that these lists of Foundation resources are growing and even more importantly these lists are becoming increasingly diverse with respect to institution. Diversity on these lists is what keeps us from being too dependent on any one institution or any one individual in the long term.
/Chuck