[sakai-mobile] Mobile Sakai – Next Steps

[Johnson,Douglas F]

Greetings All; and a special welcome to those who have joined us following the EuroSakai Conference!

While in California and in Europe, I spent a fair amount of time talking to various individuals and groups about this Mobile Sakai initiative. To put it mildly, wrapping my mind around all the various initiatives already under way has been quite a challenge. At the same time, it has been truly exciting to me to be able to engage the vast creativity of the Sakai Community, even at a superficial level.

That being said, I think the biggest task in front of the Mobile Sakai project is to figure how best to tap your expertise and creativity to a more-or-less common end. So I have three proposals to put forward:

1. After many discussions, I’d like to suggest we establish five working groups:
	a. Data – What data? How to move data to and from mobile devices? Most likely focusing on Entity Broker
	b. Authentication & security – OAuth/Shibboleth; addressing security on mobile devices, two factor
		 authentication?
	c. Services – Identifying. prioritizing Sakai tools to work in the mobile environment; identifying necessary 
		components to mobilize
	d. Interface – UI/UX 
	e. OEA – Defining a-d above for OAE

To start with, I need someone to volunteer to coordinate each work group; so let me know ASAP if you’re interested. For example, I know that Charles Sturt is very interested in the OAE work; Indiana has done good work on data exchange; and Oxford has done some excellent work on Authentication and Mobile. If these schools are willing to bring their work to the table, we could find ourselves well on the way to a functioning project. The work group leaders primary tasks will be to: a) coordinate group activities (conference calls, coding sessions, etc.); b) to maintain and update files and documents associated with the work group; c) to serve as the primary interface with other work groups; d) to guide actual work within each work group.

Each working group will be tasked with identifying a coherent direction for addressing fundamental issues (e.g. What data is needed on a mobile device? How best to “chunk” and transfer data? Etc.). In addition, each work group will want to collect code to address these processes from various participants willing to share – these code contributions will become a “seed bank” for further development.

2. To help stimulate the actual development process, I’d like to schedule a “Virtual Sakai Mobile Hackathon” (or “Code Bash,” or whatever you prefer to call it) shooting for some time in February 2012 (“Sakai Winter of Code?”). I am proposing a “work where you are,” follow the sun, 48-hour (plus) marathon of collaboration and coding mediated by synchronous and asynchronous collaboration tools. Coding teams would use a common repository for documents, documentation, code, etc. (see item 3) with various participants picking up where previous work left off as daylight (or moonlight for you nocturnal coders) travels around the planet.

After the Hackathon, we’ll meet to regroup, assess where we are, and identify next steps in reaching the common framework for Mobile Sakai.

Ideally the 5 work groups will each have a number of conversations between now and February to frame specific goals and objectives for their own piece of this Hackathon.

3. We need to set up a working repository for documents, code, and any other “artifacts” related to this project. One obvious possibility is for everyone to upload files to the Mobile Sakai Confluence site [http://tinyurl.com/sakai-mobile] – though that is not the ideal location for storage. Another possibility is that I can set up some Google resources (docs, hangouts, etc.) to host materials and collaboration.  

Comments and suggestions are welcome on each and all of these topics. So let’s get the discussion started and quickly follow that with some work!


Peace,

Doug

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Douglas F. Johnson, Ph.D.
Assistant Director for Learning Services
Office of Information Technology
Hub 132 | 352.392.4357, opt 3.

Between the idea and the reality … Between the conception and the creation … Falls the Shadow.
- T.S. Elliot, The Hollow Men