[Portfolio] Radio Button for Creating New Portfolio Sites to Be Hidden in Sakai 10

[janice.smith]

A message to users of the Open Source Portfolio tools in Sakai:

You may have recently heard about the proposed status of the Open Source Portfolio (OSP) tools in Sakai 10. In the near future, a proposal will be put forward to the Sakai Project Management Committee (PMC) to do the following:

OSP in Sakai 10 Proposal: The Sakai release team will disable the Portfolio site type. This would mean that existing portfolio sites could add OSP tools to existing sites, but users could not create new portfolio sites in the default Sakai distribution. Re-enabling the creation of portfolio sites would require a configuration change and re-deploy. Alternately, an admin user could change the site type in the Sites tool to convert newly created sites to portfolio sites. The following Jira has been created to track this work at https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-25587
 

Rationale: The OSP portfolio tool plays an important role at a number of institutions. However resources for developing, maintaining and QA testing of the OSP tool set have become scarce as the community starts to focus on other, more up-to-date open source options, especially Project Karuta, an LTI-1 tool ( https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/OSP/Portfolios+for+the+Future+of+Sakai). Therefore, we probably do not want institutions new to Sakai adopting OSP, when the support for this tool is not strong. It is likely that OSP will not be a part of Sakai 11 and for this reason, should not be promoted as a preferred tool in Sakai 10.  It should stay fully in Sakai 10 core in order to provide time for institutions to plan their next stage in managing their portfolio functionality. 
 

My position on this proposal is that given the lack of new development and QA resources for OSP going forward. it seems inevitable that OSP will not be a part of Sakai 11 and that hiding the radio button for creating new portfolio sites in Sakai 10 is a reasonable step to foreshadow the future. At the same time, keeping OSP as part of Sakai 10  for the next several years will enable any institution currently using OSP to plan for the future with ample time and due consideration for all concerned stakeholders. I am therefore in favor of the proposal.

In saying the above, I need to correct some of the information I conveyed those attending the OSP Community meeting on Monday, February 3, At the time, I did not understand that members of the PMC prefer to hide the radio button for the creation of new portfolio sites in Sakai 10 regardless of whether the current critical and blocker OSP issues for Sakai 10 are resolved. However, if these several issues are not resolved, the radio button for new sites would be hidden AND OSP functionality in Sakai 10 would be rolled back to that of Sakai 2.9 (making the new Indiana University enhancements to OSP unavailable in Sakai 10). The good news is that we are well on our way (but could still use more help) to resolving the current critical and blocker issues for OSP in Sakai 10 and if no additional issues are found (that cannot be resolved in time), OSP will continue to be a core tool set for all current users in Sakai 10.

If you have questions or concerns or would like to discuss this issue, please post to the Sakai portfolio list at portfolio at collab.sakaiproject.org or, if you wish, contact me directly for more information.

Janice

Janice A. Smith, Ph.D.
Three Canoes LLC
1204 Laurel Avenue
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55104, USA
651-642-9069, 207-841-6262 (cell)
janice.smith at threecanoes.com
http://threecanoes.com


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