[Using Sakai] Sakai & Canvas...

[Charles Severance]

Greg,

Great question.   First observation is that a salesperson spreading FUD about Sakai kind of suggests that they don't have a strong positive feeling about their own product.  No matter what, the best thing to to is focus on what makes a product strong without even talking about the other product.   Sounds like you are dealing with a pretty rookie salesperson that is off-message.

But to the answer to the question.   Each year I do some analytics on the developer list activity:

https://twitter.com/drchuck/status/575353312310136833

This shows a trend that at this point is about five years old.   In the beginning schools like Michigan, Indiana, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, and UCT were pulling a lot of load as the product was literally being built and rebuilt.   Also new schools were coming on all the time so a lot of the activity was helping new folks.

The early lead schools dropped in activity in 2009.   In 2009 Michigan was still the #1 participant in the dev list.   But you saw a lot of increased participation at the same time from companies like LongSIght and Unicon.  You also saw participation from the smaller commercial affiliates appearing under the gmail.com increasing as well.  

In some ways 2009-201w was Sakai's period of greatest risk as a community.  A lot of things were trending downward and near the end of 2011 there was a very good chance that Sakai 2.9 would never see the light of day and it would be "last one out turn off the lights".

But in 2012-13, we saw a big turnaround with Sakai 2.9, the brand new Lesson Builder, and then Sakai 10.  Those who were still in the community put in a lot of effort - Michigan and Longsight were in really strong leadership positions.  Other schools like Rutgers, NYU, Columbia, Duke, UNC, and others don't show up in this dev list graph but they provided much of the money and developer talent to get us through Sakai 2.9 and Sakai 10.

Interestingly in the 2013-14 timeframe we see a couple of factors at work.  First the 2102-13 sprint was over - we had Sakai 10.  Here is a SlideShare I did that celebrated that moment:

http://www.slideshare.net/csev/2013-0602sakaix

Sakai 11 is unique in that we are not expanding functionality - we are actually removing more code than we are adding and doing a bunch of UI rework in tools like Lessons, Gradebook and Portal.  These more design oriented activities tend not to cause lots of traffic on the dev lists.  another interesting trend is that now that we have weekly developer team meetings with up to 20 people attending at times, so we are coordinating in these meetings so less email is needed.

As we emerge into 2015, activity and commitment is very strong.   The commercial affiliates (large and small) are a very important part of the community.   Indiana and Stanford are quite low compared to earlier levels of participation.    But something interesting is happening.  Some of the code that was traditionally the exclusive domain of Stanford or Indiana is now being maintained by the whole community.  The interesting result is that the pace of development in those areas of the code base is increasing because now the whole community can move the code forward.  During 2011-2014 as Indiana and Stanford slowly backed away - patches and bug fixes started to pile up.  Now that the community has inherited those code based - the code is rapidly catching up. 

This is not meant as a criticism of Indiana or Stanford - they build the core codebase that we all have and without them - we would have nothing - so we are in their debt. 

Looking forward, our community is solid and making lots of progress every single week - we have the luxury of putting a lot of effort in UI and catching up with getting a backlog of local improvements from places like Oxford, Columbia, NYU, Duke, Notre Dame, and UNC moved into trunk greatly enriching our product.  And schools like Oxford, Rutgers, and UCT are continuing to make strong direct contributions to the code base.

As we see Sakai-11 coming out with its new Morpheus responsive mobile friendly portal and all of the community improvements and performance improvements  - I can see why Canvas sales people might be getting a little nervous and use a bit of FUD to try to scare you to switch now.   

/Chuck



On Mar 10, 2015, at 8:31 AM, Gregory Guthrie <guthrie at mum.edu> wrote:

> I got an interesting comment from a Canvas LMS representative;
>  
> “Sakai is such a cool concept but I do wonder where it will end up in the future, as most it's founding schools (and the schools putting resources into developing it) have now left and come to Canvas (U of Indiana, U of Michigan, Stanford)…”
>  
> I wondered what level of reality this statement has?
>  
> -------------------------------------------
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