A status update is way overdue – perhaps after this week I can make a longer status update. But here is a short one.

With Sakai 2.2 and 2.3 in hand, Sakai is in pretty solid shape except for Samigo and OSP (both provisional tools). Samigo has improved a great deal in the past six months but still suffers from scalability as the database gets large. OSP is pretty functional but is very hard to bootstrap due to a lack of good documentation, examples, and a few features that make it a little hard for system administrators to work with.
A few weeks back (at Educause) it became really clear that Samigo’s scalability was becoming such a crisis as to put the entire Sakai project at risk. The bad scenario happens when Fall 2008 increasing numbers of schools are moving from pilot to production and instead of 3-4 schools we have 15-20 schools in performance crisis – so the time to fix this is now.
An essential part of the problem with Samigo is the overall size of the database – as more assessments are taken – performance continues to drop off dramatically.
So the Foundation assembled some resources to focus on Samigo’s scalability – UM donated 100% of Glenn Golden and others have devoted staff or financial resources. Glenn has been working for the past few weeks and hopes to have a very fast version of Samigo Assessment delivery in the hands of Foothill for testing mid December aimed at production in early January – if this goes well other sites can experiment with this new assessment delivery engine. The essential change was to write the new assessment from the ground up using SQL rather than Hibernate. This has resulted in speedups of several hundred fold improvement on some of the slowest Samigo screens.
Glenn should be checking this into SVN in the next week or so – then Foothill and Stanford can begin to look it over and begin QA. For now this is best though of as a “patch” – and after the first of the year we will reorient things to deliver a solid 2.4 release in March. Using the funds gathered by the volunteers I hope to get performance testing done and some extra QA resources. Peter Knoop will project lead the effort.
It is important to emphasize that this is all being done in concert with Stanford and Stanford will continue to be the lead in functionality – there will be no change in functionality from the speedup effort.
In terms of OSP – a 2.4 kickoff meeting was held to help set priorities to meet the most pressing needs of OSP – new resources were identified and we should look forward to important improvements in OSP’s configuration and use for the 2.4 release.
Both of these efforts really highlight an increased emphasis on investing effort on those aspects of Sakai which are visible to the users. Brad uses the term “user delight” to describe this focus.
At Atlanta – I will be giving a talk about the Sakai Foundation where I will cover the organizational structure and finances of the Sakai Foundation. Getting a solid understanding of the Foundation finances is important for us to go forward and make decisions. I look forward to the presentation and the Partner-only retreat as well. the Foundation is a year old and it is a good time to take a check of where we are ant and where we want to go. For those of you who cannot come to Atlanta – I will put up the slides and MP3 record the talk as well and put that up too.
Peter’s Friday/Saturday meeting in Atlanta is an important new pattern – an attempt to actually manage our efforts collectively. This is the new “integration week” where we brainstorm tactical priorities for 2.4 – what we should attack before the code freeze in March. This meeting is an experiement – in the future – I expect these meetings may be 3-4 days long. How we organize these meetings will depend in how well things get done at Atlanta.
TTFN.