This is a bit of expansion of my previous status update. I need to expand my “Educause revelation” a bit.
Educause is a nifty way to measure how far Sakai has come because it is an annual event and one where we give talks, hold meetings, etc. So I take the occasion of Educause to reflect on things to make sure that I remain grounded in what we are doing and why we are all here.

First a little history…
At the Educause 2004 meeting, I was just amazed at the fact that so many people had heard the word “Sakai”. I was pleased to sit in the back of a talk about some cool thing like Sophia from Foothill and see the Sakai logo and an offhand reference like “we are part of Sakai”. When crowds were asked if they had heard of Sakai – nearly all hands went up in the room – it was amazing to me that in 8 short months we had so much mind-share – of course we released Sakai 1.0 the week of Educause and only Michigan and Indiana were running serious production with 1.0. We spent most of our time recruiting members – it was fun – folks wanted to join – they did not care how far we had progressed – we had just gotten our shipment of buttons and were handing them out like candy – folks just wanted to support what we were doing. The overall sense I got from folks could be summed up as “Sakai – Open Source LMS? Cool!”.
At the Educause 2005 meeting, we had put out our Sakai 2.0 release and it was really clear that we *might* actually survive – we have a number of sites in production and even more in pilot. Now people wanted to understand *what* Sakai was and how it might fit into their plans – each presentation anyone gave about Sakai was overflowing with people who wanted to get every shred of detail about this *new shiny open source LMS called Sakai*. This was also very exciting – frankly because folks were still in love with the *idea* of Sakai.
At the Educause 2006 meeting – we clearly had arrived. People still crowded into Sakai talks – but with a different view. From the questions I was getting it was clear that Sakai was just one of many alternatives – folks stopped being in love with the idea and wanted to know what was in it for them. What features does Sakai have? What hardware does it run on? Is XYZ integrated into Sakai? How many developers/support people does it take for Sakai – what is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Sakai? This fits with recent evaluations where schools pit Sakai against Moodle or Blackboard and simply look at the product features and make their decision. This is a far cry from folks swooning just on the idea of an Open Source LMS. But at the same time it is *exciting* – because it means Sakai has *arrived* in the market place – instead of a cool idea – we are the #12 vendor of LMS systems (I have no idea where we fit – just decided to start low).
This is a sobering notion – that Sakai has to compete – the period where we could just say “Sakai” and win people over is coming to an end.
The discussions around the patent and having conversations with BlackBoard about the patent also brought the fact that we are just another option in the LMS field. This is no longer a “grand experiment” – execution is what matters.
The final straw that made me wake up and “smell the coffee” was a 1 hour discussion with Barry Walsh of Indiana University. This conversation covered a lot of topics but the one that really hit me was talking about Samigo.
I won’t bother reiterating the Samigo history again – Samigo has been in Sakai since early 2005 and has never been 100% solid – it has always been improving – but we have been fire fighting for almost 2 years now. Indiana, Rutgers, and Etudes probably have taken the brunt of the pain caused by Samigo. We moved Samigo from full release to provisional in the 2.2 release to make sure that new schools would take a close look at Samigo before making a major deployment.
We all kept hoping that Samigo would turn the corner at each improvement – I kept hoping that “things would just work out” and that the community processes would just work out – I was holding onto the pure notion of the Foundation operating in a coordination and communication role and not in a directed development role. Some would say that I was just being an ostrich and “burying my head” so I could conveniently ignore the problem.
My one hour conversation with Barry came down to this simple notion – all the fancy process and purity of model does not matter much if Samigo is not a 100% solid production ready testing engine that we can all be proud of by Fall of 2007. Effectively he suggested that everything else was noise compared to the impact of Samigo – if we don’t turn the corner – and just “letting it happen” was *not* what the Foundation Executive Director should be doing.
Because of Samigo’s shortcomings, we have already lost a few schools that converted to Sakai – they converted back to something else – aargh. I know of several schools that are delaying moving from pilot to full production because of Samigo – usually the cost of such a delay at each school is between $5K and 20K per *month* where they have to run two systems side by side. My estimate is that Samigo’s incompleteness has probably cost nearly $1 million dollars across our partners in programmer time and the cost of running multiple systems. Ouch.
What is worse – is I estimate that there are likely 50+ schools that will seriously evaluate Sakai when the 2.4 release comes out – these schools are different from our core base – our core base is from schools that have lots of programmers and often have years of experience with home-grown code. We groove on debugging stuff. This next round of adopters will want Sakai to replace a commercial or open source system that is probably pretty mature and solid – they will not be impressed when the testing engine does not scale under heavy use and all I can say is “Samigo *is* marked as provisional – it *has* an asterisk in our release notes”.
So, armed with this strong smell of coffee (and a headache from Barry’s talk) in the past month a lot of focus has moved to Samigo – we called for resources – and set about fixing things up using the most direct path possible – spending resources, time and money in the effort. We are not going to stand on principe or worry about process – this is a fire fight of the most basic form. I am glad we started in time – I shudder to think where we would be if this were being done June 2007 for a Fall 2007 rollout with 150,000 users at Indiana.
Stanford has been 100% supportive and helpful in this effort. Etudes has volunteered to test the new high performance code – Etudes is at the greatest immediate risk of negative outcome followed closely by Rutgers – Indiana will be in a crisis September 2007 – if anyone else is at risk because of Samigo – please let me know.
Now we don’t need 110 people working on Samigo – we just need everyone to understand that Samigo needs to be the #1 priority until it performs at scale. It does not mean that everything else needs to stop – just know that if there is a priority choice between Samigo and anything else – Samigo wins until we really turn the corner.
OK – Enough of the gloom and doom – lets look toward the future.
First – I am 100% sure that Samigo will rock and roll and kick ass by September 2007 – it will be in production at Indiana September 2007 with 150,000 users and run smoothly – the kind of talent we have in Sakai to throw at this problem is amazing – our problem so far has been one of focus – not resources or talent – with the focus properly aimed – this will all work out.
I started this update talking about Educause and want to wrap up back on Educause. How will it feel to be part of Sakai October 23 at Educause in Seattle?
Well, first off we will have a product (including Samigo) that is solid across the board. There are architectural changes (RSF, JSR-168, new approaches to JDBC, and others) that will put us in a very strong position to build and deploy an awesome set of tools with far greater developer ease of use and developer efficiency.
By the way – something happened that we barely noticed with the release of Sakai 2.3 that we need to really celebrate – architecture work for the first time in the project is being done *in parallel* – Cambridge has taken the lead on a number of architectural areas – other architectural elements like import and course management are also being done at Texas State and Berkeley/Stanford/AU Arizona respectively. Site Setup is being modified by Arizona State – many things that two years ago were single threaded are now running in parallel. I will tell you that it feels great not to be single threaded any more.
Enough back patting – back to Educause.
At the next Educause we need to be a solid alternative LMS system and we need to act like it. We need some pre-conference sessions – we need a session on Developing for Sakai and a session on Teaching with Sakai – we need people to submit papers and give talks about Sakai – I should probably upgrade from the $25.00 trade show registration and have a real $500.00 registration and go to sessions. It seems like it has taken a while for Educause to warm up to Open Source in general – but to me the Educause Board statement about BlackBoard’s patents that came out in October is about as open a door as we can expect for us to dive in and participate more fully in Educause.
The recent update to www.edutools.org is really neat – we need to up our game beyond this to better support folks doing comparative analysis and looking at Sakai as an alternative – hey we need a session at Educause called “How to Evaluate Open Source LMS Systems in a Procurement Process” and a “Total Cost of Sakai Ownership” presentation as well at Educause – I could go on and on..
I think that we should all put on a full-court press on Educause – we should be proud of what we have accomplished in three short years – where three years ago I was amazed when someone simply said the word “Sakai” out loud – to being a significant force in the market place.
I am looking forward to seeing everyone in Atlanta. For the first time in three years, I won’t be giving the Architecture talk – Ian Boston of Cambridge will be giving that talk – my only talk is the Sakai Foundation Update where I will cover costs, expenses, org charts, processes, and lots of cool minutia about the workings of the Sakai Foundation – if you are a partner representative I also encourage you to attend the “Partner Retreat Session” which is representatives only. The purpose of the rep-only meeting is *not* to have a bunch of “secrets” – the financial stuff is in the public session – fully disclosed. The purpose of the retreat is to get together and talk and discuss whatever topics come up. A key outcome it to make sure to get a strong understanding of what the “Sakai shareholders” (the folks writing the checks) really want from the Foundation.
Thanks for listening.