Two new Sakai Foundation Members

If you were in Newport Beach you probably heard my announcement on Wednesday morning of the two newest Sakai Foundation members, both from outside of North America, which is really great news.

Notes from Newport Beach (part 1)

Well, I’m just about recovered from my first Sakai Conference since I officially took up the Executive Director position. I left simultaneously exhausted and energized, if that’s not too much a contradiction. My experience of the conference is definitely not typical, of course, as I’m involved in organizing it (although very little, thanks to the excellent team) and I use the opportunity to meet with people who have traveled from afar to attend. A few highlights, though:

A nice moment in Newport Beach

I’ll have a more extensive blog post later, but I’d thought I’d share this tidbit that may test what you think you know about the Sakai community. This is, to some extent, an “insider” post that requires more context than most of my posts, and for that I apologize…

I walked into a room with two people huddled over a laptop, looking at code.

• One was the newest member of the Sakai community. The other was one of the original members of the Sakai team.
• One was from Berkeley, the other from Michigan.
• One was a user experience designer, the other was a developer.

This is already a set of contrasts that may be surprising to those familiar with traditional “divisions” in the Sakai community, real or perceived.

The real kicker for me, though, was that the developer was asking the designer for advice on his coding practices. Cool!

The designer? Eli Cochran from Berkeley.

The developer? Glenn Golden from Michigan.

Here’s to working across boundaries to make Sakai better.

(for the record, it was JavaScript)