[Building Sakai] Forming the Sakai Maintenance Team

[Anthony Whyte]

A number of Sakai Community members are participating in the formation  
of a Sakai maintenance team in order to better address issues in the  
Sakai code base as well as provide a mechanism by which institutions  
can reclaim a portion of their development resources after the  
delivery of production-ready code.  Insitutional contributions involve  
pledging a named contributor or a set of hours for a specified period  
of time.  For instance, UCT has contributed a portion of David  
Horwitz's work week to the team while the University of Michigan plans  
to contribute up to .5 FTE/week spread across several developers.

The maintenance team will focus its energies on addressing quality  
issues in existing code. The team will likely assume responsibility  
for specific projects no longer maintained by individual institutions  
and will consider taking on maintenance duties for new projects that  
are added to a Sakai release.  The maintenance team will respect  
project boundaries and will seek prior permission before addressing  
issues involving projects with active and stable teams such as  
Portfolios (OSP) and Test & Quizzes (Samigo).  The Maintenance team  
will use the sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org list for communications  
among members.  If you want to communicate with the maintenance team,  
please use the dev list.

In Jira, there now exists a default "Maintenance Team" account that  
can be assigned issues.  In the coming days a number of Jira Sakai  
project component leads will be reassigned to the maintenance team.

Maintenance team membership need not be limited to developers but can  
(and should) include others who can contribute positively to team  
activities.  For developers, Java experience together with a  
familiarity of supporting technologies such as Subversion and Apache  
Maven will be expected. Developers new to Sakai are also encouraged to  
participate although they should expect that their patches will  
receive careful review from their more experienced colleagues.

If you are interested in participating in maintenance team activities  
please contact me at arwhyte at sakaifoundation.org.

For a more complete outline of maintenance team goals, scope of  
activities and governance, please read the Maintenance Team Proposal  
(link below).

Maintenance Team Proposal:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhprnqfz_3dgffm9g6

Named contributors (to date)

Matthew Buckett, Oxford University (5 hrs/week)
Nuno Fernandes, University Fernando Pessoa (5 hrs/week)
David Horwitz, University of Cape Town (5 hrs/week)
Tony Stevenson, University of Cambridge (3-5 hrs/week)
Seth Theriault, Columbia University (3 hrs/wek)
Steve Swinsburg, Australian National University (4 hrs/week)
Anthony Whyte, Sakai Foundation (5 hrs/week)
Aaron Zeckoski, University of Cambridge (5 hrs/week)

Other Contributors (to date)
University of Michigan, up to .5 FTE/week
Unicon Cooperative Support

We hope to begin addressing issues as a team within the next week or so.

Cheers,

Anthony

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