[sakai-pmc] Executive Summary Sakai 10

Thu May 22 07:25:34 PDT 2014

“…outside of our community messages go around that say Sakai is dead.”

That was on the EDUCAUSE CIO list, arguably one of the most widely read
lists in the campus CIO community.   The message was refuted a little bit
and wasn’t from a credible source anyway, so no, the Sakai sky isn’t
falling and Neal’s right that we shouldn’t be alarmist about it.

OTOH, the Sakai community has to be proactive because campus leaders are
under constant pressure to embrace the newest, greatest, trendy best.   If
faculty or CIOs sense that Sakai isn’t the best, or is dying, or they don’t
understand why their campus is using Sakai, they will (and should) look
again at the market.

Neal shouldn’t feel that he has to apologize for market speak.   I have
academic DNA too, and have lived on both sides of this issue, but someone
other than a vendor has to get the word out not that Sakai isn’t dead
(geez…that’s awful), and explain WHY higher ed should care about Sakai.

Sakai’s ten years old.   On average, that’s three times longer than the
tenure of the average CIO.   Does the current crop of CIOs get it?

            Scott

*From:* sakai-pmc-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:
sakai-pmc-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] *On Behalf Of *Neal Caidin
*Sent:* Thursday, May 22, 2014 9:24 AM
*To:* Bryan Holladay
*Cc:* sakai-pmc at collab.sakaiproject.org
*Subject:* Re: [sakai-pmc] Executive Summary Sakai 10

So, I think Acknowledgements could be about vanity, but I see them as
playing a potential "marketing" role, to show a number of institutions
involved the ongoing development and improvement of Sakai. A list of
commercial affiliates (and see, I also forgot to include Flying Kite! But
this was just a first draft, in my defense) and institutions shows, not
just our community, but the world, that there is active development on
Sakai and that it is true community source, which is one of it's big
differentiators.

Believe it or not, outside of our community messages go around that say
Sakai is dead. These messages could hurt additional adoption of Sakai, not
based on merits, but perception. I don't think we should be overly alarmist
about such messages, but I do think we should take every reasonable
opportunity to show the value of our great community!

Perhaps this could be the message that helps with Crowdsourcing. Don't
promote that you contributed to Sakai for you or your institution's vanity,
promote that your institution contributed because that sends the right
message to the world about the value proposition (ouch, corporate marketing
speak).

I'm leaning towards Steve's suggestion of an alphabetical list of
contributing institutions, to keep it simple. (not sure it is up to me, but
if nobody stops me that's probably what I would "do"-ocracy ;-).

2 cents.

-- Neal

*Neal Caidin* <neal.caidin at apereo.org>

May 22, 2014 at 9:10 AM

Those are two great features! Thank you for that.

-- Neal

*Bryan Holladay* <holladay at longsight.com>

May 22, 2014 at 9:02 AM

I'm not a big fan of the acknowledgments section either.  For example you
missed two feature contributions: Peer Review and Delegated Access.  Both
were developed by me (so Longsight) but were financed and co-project
managed by separate institutions (Peer Review - NYU and Delegated Access -
Columbia).  Are we so vein we need recognition (ha I'm not trying to get on
this list, I'm just using me as an example)?  This just ends up leaving
people out and minimizing their contributions.

-Bryan

*Neal Caidin* <neal.caidin at apereo.org>

May 22, 2014 at 8:54 AM

True. But it is also more meaningful, imho, to link organizations with
specific contributions. But you are right, it is tricky for the reasons you
mention. In theory Crowdsourcing the acknowledgements would be a solution
but from my experience I am doubtful that will be effective.

Perhaps your strategy is the best one. Still a chance of missing an
institution, but maybe if the Sakai core team and PMC and Sakai Commercial
Affiliates could help, maybe we could get it 80-90% right.

?

Thanks,
Neal

*Steve Swinsburg* <steve.swinsburg at gmail.com>

May 21, 2014 at 8:21 PM

The problem with acknowledgements is that if you miss someone out, they
feel their contribution isn't valuable. There are also a number of people
that worked on some of those features (volunteer or not) that may not be
part of the organisation. I would drop the binding between feature and
organisation and list everyone in alphabetical order, or not at all.

cheers
Steve

*Neal Caidin* <neal.caidin at apereo.org>

May 21, 2014 at 3:21 PM

Hi PMC,

In addition to the detail release notes for Sakai 10, with a list of every
feature and contribution we can find and add, I think it would be good to
have an "Executive Summary" and an "Acknowledgements" area on the release
notes [1].   I've started these sections and pasting in this email for your
convenience. If anyone is a talented copy writer/editor, happy to accept
the help!

*Sakai 10 Overview*

Sakai 10 builds on the solid work of the Sakai 2.9.3 release. We have two
new tool contributions, better support for audio and video using HTML 5,
infrastructure improvements, about 50 security fixes, performance
improvements, a number of new features, and close to 2,000 fixes!
Highlights include, but are not limited to:

   - Signup tool, previously a Contrib tool, is now part of Sakai core
   - Delegated Access tool, previously a Contrib tool, is now part of Sakai
   core
   - LTI - first LMS with support for LTI 2.0
   - Peer graded Assignments
   - Group Assignments
   - Test and Quizzes has new question types: Calculated question and
   Extended Matching Items, improved precision on numeric answers, a new
   accordion-style interface for quiz setup.
   - Lessons toolbar has been redesigned and simplified, better support for
   embedded Audio and video, new Table of Contents feature, support for inline
   use of polls, and better overall look and feel.
   - Resources has support for drag and drop adding of files from desktop
   for all browsers, and support for folder drag and drop in Chrome.
   - Student pages can be owned by a group as well as individuals
   - Syllabus Tool updated with a new interface, bulk update of syllabus
   items, accordion view, and better handling of link migration
   - Gradebook added support for extra credit.
   - Distributed Cacheing provides support for JCache/JSR-107 which
   includes improvement to the default cache sizes and better control by
   configuration. Session replication to failover from one server to another
   without losing session data. Overall provides better performance for large
   Sakai installation (though please note that these features are not turned
   on by default OOTB).
   - Security Updates. The Sakai community fixed about 50 security issues
   including various XSS issues and CSRF issues.  AntiSamy is on by default in
   Sakai 2.9.3 and Sakai 10. AntiSamy ensures that user supplied HTML/CSS is
   in compliance within an application's rules.
   - Student Success Portal - new integration available.
   - Java - added support for JDK 7.x. JDK 8.x support is in process of
   being added.
   - Sakai technical organization simplified. Reincorporated many of the
   "Indies" to make management of Sakai releases and reporting of issues
   easier.

*Sakai 10 Acknowledgements*

   - Yale for the contribution of the Signup Tool to Sakai core.
   - Rutgers for ongoing development of the Lessons tool.
   - S2U (Spanish speaking users group, a consortium of several
   institutions) for making many contributions to the Sakai 10 release,
   especially fixing security issues.
   - Unicon as the lead and primary contributor for the new Sakai cacheing
   framework
   - Longsight for conversion of Audio recording from Java applet to HTML 5
   based
   - Sakai documentation group for creating brand new Sakai 10 help
   documentation and to the Apereo Foundation to fund licensing of the
   software used to support the effort.
   - Asahi Net for contribution of the new ElasticSearch engine for the
   Sakai search tool and as primary contributor for the Resources
   Drag-and-Drop feature.
   - Oxford for a new Contrib Search tool - Solr
   - University of Michigan for CSS contributions to Sakai 10 and in Lessons

*Questions about these sections*
Is the Sakai 10 Overview too long? Should it be more in prose rather than
bullet points?

There are some other cool features I know about, but didn't include
(because it was getting to be a long list!). Examples Project Keitai
[probably this one needs to be up in that list], some fixes to Forums like
Ranking / Moving a thread to a different topic/ showing topics with unread
messages, Messages tool has an improved interface, Joinable Groups, Video
chat is now in core (though off by default), CK Editor improvements
including Audio recording, .. and I could probably dig up more candidates
for the "summary".

Can I start with this as a good starting set of Acknowledgements and
Crowdsource it? Maybe I should put it in alphabetical order of contributor
so I don't get into trying to rank the importance of the contributions?

Is it okay to say about 2,000 fixes? I count 1750, which seems like an
incredible amount of Jiras that went into Sakai 10, but suspect it was
partially due to the Sakai 2.9 delays and fixes aggregating [2]

[1] Sakai 10 draft release notes (still in progress) -
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=86245732
[2] over 1750 issues fixed - use JQL - fixVersion in versionMatches("10.*")
and resolution = Fixed

Thanks,
Neal

-- 
Neal Caidin
Sakai Community Coordinator
Apereo Foundation
neal.caidin at apereo.org
Skype me! (but let me know in advance for the first interaction) - nealkdin
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