In the rush to Sakai 2.0, two Sakai developers quietly laboured along with the world on their shoulders – Anthony Whyte and Lydia Li. A week after the cathartic Sakai 2.0 release, the eyes of the Learning Management world and the Sakai Project would be on Sheffield, UK watching to see which systems and applications would *really* interoperate at the IMS Tool Interoperability Demonstration.

Like many scary stories, the tension and pressure leading up to the climatic event simply magnified the happiness that everyone felt when it turned out that the story has a happy ending and the LMS’s and tools interoperated happily ever after.
This is an exciting development for Sakai and for IMS. By focusing on developing code first and letting specifications folow the code development we ended up with something that worked pretty quickly (using the Glacial Standards time scale).
This effort really demonstrated the value of IMS where commercial and non-commercial, large and small organizations can work together for a common goal of making the market better for the customers and for all of the vendors.
The question of course is how to top this – that which does not kill us makes us stronger. Here is my suggestion. Imagine a set of publishers (O’Reilly, McGrawHill, Addison Wesley, etc etc) walking around with e-cartridges on USB memory sticks, and loading identical E-Cartridges into Sakai, Angel, WebCT, Blackboard, and (yes) Moodle.
You may say “impossible”… That is how I felt about IMS Tool Interoperability back in September…. And it turned out very well.
While everyone was 110% committed to the project, there are a few people whose dedication and commitment really formed the backbone of the project. These accolades include: our fearless leader Kevin Riley, Vishal Prashant of WebCT, Dirk Herr-Hoyman, and Bruce Barton of Wisconsin.
In essense Vishal and Bruce really were the tip of the technical spear on the project – they would work very hard and solve a problem and then lead the rest of us through the minefields.
That said, everyone worked very hard, and because there was so much effort by so many organizations is why this was so exciting.
Take a look at http://www.dr-chuck.com/media/ – the top item is the report from Alt-i-lab. I am going to try to do more of these little video vignettes as we go forward.
Whew!