I attended the Kuali Days event (www.kuali.org) in Tucson, AZ this week. The event was hosted by the University of Arizona and it was a wonderful meeting location. The hotel is carved out of a mountain covered in Sagauro cactus. The view from the hotel onto the Tucson valley.
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/11/index.php?img=14-11-06_110743_01.jpg

The meeting had sessions that ranged from overviews of Kuali Foundation and governance, a demo of Kuali 1.0 functionality, announcement of the Kuali appliance from rSmart, , as well as technical sessions talking about the Kulai Architecture and Technologies.
The Kuali project is reaching the end of its project phase (6/30/2007) and is beginning its movement into its Foundation phase much Like Sakai’s transition from project to Foundation at the end of 2005. So in many ways this was a meeting to present Kuali to prospective Foundation members.
The overwhelming impression that I walked away from all of the sessions I attended was one of excitement. All the attendees were very engaged and interested in all of the details about Kuali. I will admit that the conversations about the finer points of cross-unit sub-chart code link associations was a bit dry for my taste – people engaged in the conversations with gusto.
What was amazing to me is how well each attendee seemed to understand their own requirements and needs very precisely and how they could communication those requirements. The Kuali team members knew Kuali very well and were able to discuss how to adapt Kuali to some tricky local need in great detail.
I met Brian McGough the Kuali Chief Architect and Kathleen McNeely the Chair of the Kuali Functional Council. Both are excellent leaders and good speakers – clearly strong leadership is an important factor in the success of Kuali to date.
On the technical side I was interested in many aspects of the Kuali Architecture – they are building the Kuali Service Bus (KSB) to interconnect the various Kauli applications like Kuali Funancials (KFS) and Kuali Research Administration (KRA). This bus is already present in the Kuali 1.0 release and as Kuali moves into scalable production – they will gain increasing experience with the KSB. Once Kuali figures out the issues in the KSB, I would expect that there is some best practice and even possibly technology that might be useful in Sakai – perhaps in particular to talk to some future open source Student Information System (SIS) that folks keep talking about in hushed tones.
On a personal note, I played Texas HoldEm for money for the first time in my life. I had an amazing streak of luck – at one point I took all of Kymber Horn’s chips when she went “all in” and I called – she had me totally beat until I made a flush on the River – total luck. I had far more chips than anyone else (see photo). When we got down to three players we decided to split the pot – since Tony Pottts was still in – I figured I should quit while I was ahead. Now I am afraid that if I ever play again, I will lose and break my 1-0 unbeaten streak :). Here is picture of my chip stack:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/11/index.php?img=15-11-06_012401_01.jpg