[Using Sakai] Another review of Free As in Freedom

[Luke FERNANDEZ]

For those of you interested in Sakai history, or in Chuck's book Free As
In Freedom I've written my own informal review of it at:


http://itintheuniversity.blogspot.com/


Or read the linkless version in the P.S. to this email


Cheers,


Luke


PS:


A couple of weeks ago I bought Chuck’s Sakai: Free As In Freedom
(Alpha).When it arrived in the mail from Amazon, I thought, “great,
another $20 shelled out on a book that was exciting to buy but that I
won’t actually read with all the other distractions in my life.” How
wrong I was. Chuck’s book is actually a page-turner – at least for those
of us who’ve tried to tag along for the Sakai ride. There have already
been two positive reviews of the book by Jim Farmer and Alan Berg. Like
them, I took no small pleasure in reading it not least because Chuck
reveals a lot of things that I was only vaguely aware of (having never
sat on the Sakai board) or that I might have been familiar with but that
I’ve forgotten over the course of the years.
Not all of Chuck’s recollections can be summed up in this review but one
especially worth highlighting (and which you can get the gist of by
reading the closing chapters) is that Chuck and the board differed on
issues of governance. Anyone whose dipped more than their pinky toe into
open source initiatives knows, following Eric Raymond, that there are
cathedral style (e.g. hierarchichal) software organizations and bazaar
style (e.g. organic self-organizing) ones, and that open source (with
many notable exceptions including the up and coming Instructure)
generally gravitates toward the bazaar. But while many of us came to
Sakai (and open source) because we longed for more inclusive, less
top-down software communities, this doesn’t mean we’re partial to moving
away from the cathedral and into the bazaar in equal degree. These same
differences existed on the board and Chuck sums up the division as
follows:
My opinion was that the purpose of the Foundation was to have a light
touch and focus on nurturing the individual and organizational members
of the community. The Foundation was to be the cheerleader, the
communicator, throw good parties several times per year….and generally
give folks a rallying point to find each other… the Foundation was never
to take the responsibility for the direction of the product, nor should
the Foundation hire core developers, nor should the developers report to
the Foundation staff to receive their assignments.
The opposing view held by the majority of the board members was that the
Foundation and Foundation staff were a form of command and control with
the top of the authority hierarchy as the Sakai Foundation Board of
Directors. The…stakeholders were concerned that letting
individuals….make their own priority decisions….would be too risky
for the adopting schools…..Central control and guidance was needed to
insure that the product would move forward according to a well-defined
and well-understood roadmap and do so on an agreed-to schedule.
Given my own school’s tepid reception to the Sakai product (I still
remember one Weber student who summed up his experience in version 2.4x
with the withering description “everything is scattered from hell to
breakfast”), we were receptive, on pragmatic grounds, to a little more
command and control planning. And yet, at the same time, Chuck’s vision
appealed to my own deeply seated political and pedagogical beliefs.
Especially as Chuck justifies them near the end of his diary:
The reason that I prefer a bazaar-style organizational structure for
Sakai was that software for teaching and learning is something that
everyone understands and has feelings about.There is not one set of
designated experts who can define and design teaching and learning
software and hand that design to some developers and have them “code it
up” as if programming was an advanced form of typing….good ideas can
literally come from any part of the world and an idea can come as easily
from a student as from a professional instructional designer. So I felt
that it would be wrong to let design and priority decisions rest in the
hands of a select few.
Given the competing virtues that are inherent in authoritarian and more
anarchic governance structures, it was true, as Chuck also observed,
that there wasn’t a “universally correct” organizational strategy that
Sakai could have followed. But for better or worse, Chuck’s vision
differed from most of the board’s and in his view it played an important
role in his decision to relinquish the executive directorship to Michael
Korcuska at the Amsterdam conference in the summer of 2007.
Chuck’s sympathies with a more loosely organized development model can
also be found in other places in his narrative. For example, while he
eventually learns to appreciate Carol Dippel and her QA efforts, he’s
initially skeptical. And while he credits Mike Elledge’s use of
Microsoft Project to systematize Sakai’s development efforts he readily
admits his own aversion to using it.The portrait is rounded out when
Chuck recounts buying a couple of suits for bettering his Sakai
advocacy: apparently his credit card company flagged the purchase as
suspicious. By whatever stereotypes of consumer behavior credit card
companies use to build portraits of their users they seemed to have
pegged him more as a Birkenstock than Wingtip kind of guy.
I’ve only talked with Chuck once very briefly while riding up an
elevator at the Movenpick hotel at the Amsterdam conference.But I don’t
get the sense, even after noting the above predilections, that he’s a
simple Richard Stallman caricature who is out to “stick it to the man.”
For example, in contrast to some of the rest of us, his misgivings of
Blackboard were not that deep-seated. He describes the patent suit as a
defensive action that any corporation out to protect share-holder value
would have been interested in pursuing (p. 176) And in spite of the suit
he continued to seek productive partnerships between Sakai and the
Blackboard corporation. Like Brad and Joseph he knew how to appeal to
freaks like me who sometimes have difficulty acknowledging that our
401-k’s make us complicit too in the heartlessness of capitalism. But he
did it in a way without alienating potential partnerships with
commercial interests outside academe.
As the Soviet’s used to say (and as historians often still profess),
“the future may be certain but the past is always contested
territory.” Which is another way of saying that if Chuck has offered up
an intriguing story, I hope it doesn’t end up being the authoritative
history of Sakai. The sub-title, after all, is a “retrospective diary”
rather than a history, which would suggest that many other stories are
worth telling. For example, Chuck glosses over the divisions that arose
between those of us who saw Sakai primarily as an LMS and as a commodity
whose core design could largely be derived from prior art and those who
proclaimed the LMS as dead and Sakai as a larger platform and community
forinnovating new online teaching technologies. The CLE versus LMS story
is, I expect, only one of many other stories worth telling. Perhaps, as
Jim Farmer has suggested, we need to publish a compilation? In the
meantime Chuck’s book is a great (Alpha) history.