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

[Anthony Whyte]

Sakai has had a profound and beneficial impact on my life--both professionally and personally--and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.  A hearty thanks to all those who helped transform table talk into a higher education initiative that has changed ways of thinking, ways of sharing and, not least, ways of doing.

[I mentioned the above to Brad yesterday and I'd like to share it with rest of the Founders. :)]

anthony whyte | its and mlibrary | university of michigan | arwhyte at umich.edu | 517-980-0228


On Sep 22, 2013, at 6:26 PM, Brooks, Lois wrote:

> Brad,
> 
> What a flood of memories this brings back! We've collectively accomplished a lot in the ten years since and made many good friends along the way. Congratulations to the community for your accomplishments, and thanks, Brad, for reminding us of this.
> 
> Lois
> 
> Lois Brooks
> Vice Provost, Information Services
> Oregon State University
> Corvallis, Oregon
> 
> From: Wheeler, Bradley C [bwheeler at iu.edu]
> Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2013 3:00 PM
> To: announcements at collab.sakaiproject.org
> Cc: ian.dolphin at apereo.org; Anthony Whyte (arwhyte at umich.edu); Brooks, Lois; joseph.hardin at gmail.com; Chuck Severance (csev at umich.edu); merriman at MIT.EDU; Lance Speelmon (lance at speelmon.com); 'Amitava Mitra (babi at MIT.EDU)'; Ira Fuchs (irafuchs at gmail.com); James Hilton - University of Michigan (hilton at umich.edu); Carl Jacobson
> Subject: Happy 10 Year Anniversary, Sakai - 22 September 2003
> 
> 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
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> IU Vice President for IT & CIO, Dean, and Professor
> Indiana University, 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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