Context

What is Sakai?

The Sakai Community develops and distributes the open-source Sakai CLE, an enterprise-ready collaboration and courseware management platform that provides users with a suite of learning, portfolio, library and project tools.

Why use Sakai?

Designed by educators, for educators. The people building Sakai work at campuses just like yours. We believe they know best what features academic users value.

Flexible, Free and Open. Sakai is a powerful yet flexible solution that supports not only teaching and learning but also research and administrative collaboration. The Sakai CLE is distributed free of charge and our license is designed to encourage innovation and customization in order to meet local campus needs.

Our Community. Sakai is an active community of educational institutions working together to solve common problems and share best practices. The professional development and cross-institutional knowledge sharing are benefits hard to find elsewhere.

Source: http://sakaiproject.org/portal

Conference

Last month, I got the opportunity to attend the Sakai Conference in Boston. It was the first direct contact I had with the Sakai community and hopefully not the last. The reason for my presence in Boston is the focus we have in ISDC on Open Source technologies and on future projects using such technologies.

What impressed me the most were the basic principles that an open source software community like Sakai relies on: professionalism, dedication and passion for what they are doing, openness towards a big variety of the latest edge technologies, strive to get the best architecture, user experience, performance for future version of Sakai framework, openness to integrate newcomers in the community and start/develop a long term collaboration, and supportiveness and openness to share knowledge with other communities.

The most waited/attended/interesting conference session was Sakai's Next Generation Version/K2 Technical Overview -> http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SAKDEV/Sakai+Kernel#SakaiKernel-K2

Other very interesting conference sessions were the Hackathon sessions in which whoever showed up decided what would happen.

Please see http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF10/Wednesday+-+Hackathon+Go .

I was fascinated to be able to see what Sakai Community is about and get in contact with people involved in developing or using current or future Sakai framework version. I am really looking forward to a future involvement/collaboration within Sakai community. And I have reasons to believe this is likely to happen.

If you want to see one of my interviews, just click http://www.qik.com/video/2128854.