This is a proposal I sent to the Sakai Foundation Board as to my thoughts on whether or not we should have one or two large Sakai conferences per year. Since there is a public discourse on this now, I will put it up on my blog.

One Conference Per Year
I strongly feel that we should drop to one world-wide conference per year. This would free up somewhere between $200K and $300K from the annual budget. This document describes what I would suggest we do with the freed up funds. This proposal stays under @200K so that it should reduce budget pressure in the net.
The high level proposal breaks down into two related parts: (a) encourage smalller regional Sakai meetings organized locally and support those meetings and (b) hire a training coordinator for the Foundation.
Regional Conferences
I think that we need to encourage smaller conferences – regional in nature and organized by a local group – not the Sakai Foundation. The Sakai Foundation needs to send staff to these meetings and at times financially support these meetings. Some examples are probably the best way to describe this:
– South Africa has its own Sakai User’s meeting – the SF gave them $2K for incidentals and there are a number of community members from the UK going at their own expense to present at the meeting.
– Sakai Europe was a great success – we sent three people from the Foundation and a Fellow went at his own expense.
– We are coordinating a track at the June JA-Sig meeting in Denver – we are sending two people from the SF to present and Cambridge is sending Aaron to do the programmer Cafe – this cost would be less than $10K.
I think that another important trend is to have meetings focused on teaching with Sakai – these meetings need to be organized, hosted, and attended by teachers. The SF can support these meetings by covering incidentals such as food and snack breaks. Often $2K is a large sum for these small meetings and finding money for snacks is often the most difficult challenge for meeting organizers.
Training Coordinator
The first thing I would do is hire a training coordinator and buy out half of their salary and give them travel money. The job description for the TC is very much like the QA position:
– Maintain a training site for Sakai
– Act as an organizing point and single point of contact for training activity in the Sakai community
– Develop, gather, and maintain a library of training materials for Sakai
– Give training at Sakai conferences and other venues as needed
– Create a “train the trainer” program so Sakai community members can become competent in giving the training
– Develop and collect reusable on-line training materials for Sakai
The curriculum would include topics like
– Teaching with Sakai
– Distance
– Hybrid
– Intro to Sakai Programming
– Advanced Sakai Programming
– Installing and Configuring Sakai
The effort would be a combination of work performed directly by the training coordinator and community work as well.
Summary
I would spend about $200K on this effort including the salary support, meeting support, and travel to the smaller meetings.
This would really enhance the feeling of community with Sakai and reduce the feeling that Sakai is a “vendor”. By bringing Sakai to regional meetings, overall member expense is significantly reduced. We have to remember that the world wide meetings are expensive for our members as well as expensive for the Foundation.