[Announcements] Happy 10 Year Anniversary, Sakai - 22 September 2003

[Wheeler, Bradley C]

Colleagues,

Happy 10 Year anniversary near to the day and hour 10 years ago that the Sakai Project formally began to take shape.  As I recall, Chuck Severance also recounts this story in his book, and my recollection is recorded in the 2007 OSS Watch commissioned case study (excerpt below).  The Mellon Foundation grant was approved on 15 December 2003 (thank you Ira Fuchs), and that may be a world record from concept to funded project.

In the last decade, our institutions have learned a lot regarding how to achieve things together.  Happy birthday, everyone!

--Brad
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IU Vice President for IT & CIO, Dean, and Professor
Indiana University, http://ovpit.iu.edu<http://ovpit.iu.edu/>




3. Project history (Excerpt from http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/cs-sakai)

The Sakai Project was formulated at an impromptu dinner in Ann Arbor, Michigan with Joseph Hardin (U. of Michigan), Amitava Mitra (MIT), Jeff Merriman (MIT), Charles Severance (U. of Michigan), Lance Speelmon (Indiana U.), and Brad Wheeler (Indiana U.) on 22nd September 2003. The project built upon prior code-sharing collaborations between Indiana, Michigan, and Stanford (with Lois Brooks) universities. Michigan, MIT, and Stanford had also previously collaborated as part of the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) Project. All four institutions had decisively chosen not to use a commercial VLE and were independently pursuing development of a next generation set of software tools to support education and research. Thus, Sakai was born through a merging of efforts for home-grown systems with a vision to scale the collaboration to a vibrant open source community. The project agreed to combine the 'best-of' software tools and intellectual property from its founders to create the Sakai software.

The Sakai Project was announced at EDUCAUSE in November 2003 (Figure 1). The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, and Stanford University agreed to collectively contribute US$4.4m in staff to the Sakai Project. The OKI Project and uPortal, via JA-SIG (with Carl Jacobson), also joined as Sakai co-founders. In December, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation added US$2.4m to the Sakai Project based on the strength of the partners and their commitment to implement Sakai. In February 2004, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation seeded the Sakai Educational Partners Program (SEPP) with US$300,000 as half of its first year start up budget. SEPP was announced in March with 19 founding educational partners.

Also Archived in IU Scholarworks at http://hdl.handle.net/2022/6689

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