Amsterdam OpenIC Symposium

Photo CC-BYNCSA by MorBCN

I spent part of last week in Amsterdam at the invitation of University of Amsterdam for the OpenIC Symposium (program in Dutch, running on Sakai). I learned a lot about what’s happening at UvA (great things!),  visited Edia, a consulting company that provides Sakai services, and the Vrije Universiteit. I even gave a lecture on Open Source governance to a class of Masters students who are learning about OS technology (also at UvA). This post is about the symposium itself. Later this week I’ll blog about the other things I learned….

AuSakai 09

AuSakai 09 Logo

I just returned from a great week in Australia, primarily for AuSakai 09. I also had meetings with many groups at Charles Sturt University (where the conference was held) and visited University of New England in Armidale.

Clay Fenlason and I arrived early Monday morning on the same flight from SFO and took the short flight to Bathurst, where Charles Sturt has one of its campuses. Monday was spent recovering from the trip and going out to dinner with Ian Boston and Matt Morton-Allen. On Tuesday Clay and I had a series of meetings with groups at CSU. Charles Sturt has just taken an official decision to provide resources for Sakai 3 development. This is great news for everyone, including CSU. They are currently running 2.4.x and have several substantial local customizations. This makes upgrading more difficult, a fact that they have recognized. By engaging early in Sakai 3 development, they should be able to ensure that their requirements are met by the base version of Sakai 3 and, therefore, reduce their customization costs.

Educause: Open Source Innovation Showcase

Earlier this year the JA-Sig conference in St. Paul Minnesota brought together members from a variety of different Higher Education Open Source communities, including Sakai, D Space, Fedora Commons and Kuali. The Executive Directors of these project have stayed in touch and have been talking about different ways to work together.

Well, I’m happy to say that we’ll all be at Educause and will be participating in what is shaping up to be a very nice event on Wednesday, October 29th from 10:30-12:30: The Open/Community Source Innovation Showcase. From the session description:

Over the past few years, we have been hearing more from open source and community source projects and partner institutions about how this approach to software development will affect our institutions. This session will focus on addressing key issues and challenges facing campus decision makers about the role of open source and community source applications at academic institutions. Executive directors from five higher education open source and community source communities will respond to questions posed by the moderator and members of the audience.

Openness and Sakai History

There was an excellent exchange recently on the Sakai Teaching & Learning email list (pedagogy@collab.sakaiproject.org) about how open Sakai is as a community. I’ve captured the original question and the main replies on a wiki page but thought I would highlight my own response in this space.

Here’s part of the original email that gives the general gist of things (the whole thing is on the wiki page):

…I’m presenting at the Computers & Writing conference next week: The theme is open source. I was recently talking to a colleague (main player in the C&W community) who is completely against Sakai. I honestly do not know all of his issues and concerns, but I would like to be prepared for responses and those like his at the conference. When I talked to him, he said that he was in charge at his institution of examining open source CMSs and he found Sakai to be the least open of open source CMS communities. In part, he says this because of the cost to join. He would suggest, I suppose, that cost is, itself, a gatekeeping mechanism that prevents some institutions from becoming involved. He also suggested that the community was driven primarily by developers and that it required too much developer knowledge to customize…

Some of this is just misinformation. Sakai doesn’t cost anything to use and you can certainly participate in the community without being a member of the Sakai Foundation. Other comments have some truth to them, namely, the fact that the level of knowledge needed by developers is higher than other “similar” projects. This may not be as bad as it seems (do you really want to be responsible for a million lines of PHP, I think Chuck Severance once said) but is an issue that the Sakai community is currently addressing through the MySakai work (see my recent blog post for more detail).

Georgia Tech, Bedework, and Enlightened Self-Interest

I have so much to say about what went on in St. Paul at the JA-Sig Spring Conference that I hardly know where to begin. I’ll start with a meeting that some Sakai folks had with the folks from Bedework. If you don’t know about Bedework, it’s a higher education-based community source calendar project. It’s built in Java and has an intense focus on complying with calendar standards like CalDAV. It’s currently based at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

After their excellent presentation, we (John Lewis from Unicon, Clay Fenlason from Georgia Tech, Mike Osterman from Whitman College and myself) met with three members of the core project team, Mike Douglass, Gary Schwartz and Arlen Johnson. Mike, Arlen and Gary are very knowledgeable and passionate about Bedework and their work with the standards bodies is extremely valuable for the entire higher education community. Higher Education does have a different emphasis than your average company (e.g. public events are far more important) and even some unique use cases (e.g. faculty office hours need to be made available across multiple classes). Even if your campus is not going to use Bedework you should send a big “Thank you” their way for keeping higher education use cases front and center in the standards committees. And if you’re looking for a new calendaring system, check out Bedework.

Socialism and Sakai Commercial Affiliates

 

I was recently having a glass of wine with someone who was unfamiliar with the notion of open source. She is a relatively new employee at a for-profit company in the Higher Ed space and, upon understanding the Sakai community source model, said “that sounds like socialism!” I wasn’t sure if the comment was meant to be pejorative (I live in Berkeley, after all), but maybe she’ll add a comment and let us know…We can debate about how well that label applies (it mostly depends on your definition of the term) and a variety of proprietary software firms have applied the “communist” or “socialist” label to open source. And there are certainly strands of anti-capitalist rhetoric in some open source communities. Other open source projects are explicitly profit-oriented or at least profit-friendly.Since I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently talking to Sakai commercial partners, I thought it might be a good time to discuss why I believe the success of these organizations is important to the Sakai community at large.