[sakai2-tcc] Planning for Sakai 2.10 and beyond

[Mark J. Norton]

 >   50 long-term teacher and student users of Sakai and got them into a 
room and asked them to tell us the top-10 within-tool usability problems

The very definition of a focus group, Chuck.

- Mark

On 9/24/2012 9:14 AM, Charles Severance wrote:
> Steve - I am surprised at this.  Have we learned nothing form the past 
> five years of Foundation Board meddling, Executive Director 
> initiatives, the OAE SG and URG,  and Sakai Product Council?
>
> The core problem with the OAE and Product Council is ceding product 
> direction to non-contributing stakeholders.  These are people with 
> opinions but with no idea what it takes to get something done and no 
> commitment to do the work to accomplish what they propose.   So they 
> naturally end up with amazingly expansive ideas and visions - OAE 
> choked to death because it kept re-breathing its own hot air.
>
> We in the CLE have finally gotten to the point where we have devalued 
> "hot air" - lets not slide backwards and go back to a time where hot 
> air is given equal value to actual resources.   We don't have enough 
> spare resources to survive making that mistake *again*.
>
> I am not opposed to broadening input - I think that will happen 
> naturally.   But what you propose is a full-scale return to the 
> hot-air days.  It sounds good to give a speech about it - but it is 
> fatal if we implement it.
>
> I wil be quite honest, all of a sudden I have a lot of optimism about 
> the OAE's efforts for the next few months precisely because they have 
> decided to ignore all their "stakeholder input" and decided to just 
> build something that will be pretty cool if they accomplish it.  What 
> you might see is that the OAE team in the next six months will 
> accomplish more with a tiny and shrinking budget than they 
> accomplished in the past four years with a massive budget.  The reason 
> that the OAE has a chance to be successful in the next six months is 
> that they no longer have to listen to a cacophony of overlapping, 
> contradictory, and impossible to accomplish stakeholder input.    Too 
> much stakeholder input turned out to be the the reason that the OAE 
> was unable to achieve its original project goals.
>
> Why then are you suggesting that the CLE take the same approach given 
> that things are working so well under the current CLE governance and 
> we are making predictable and slow but constant progress forward?
>
> Here is my (more genteel) comment to your blog:
>
> Steve, I am trying to understand what problem you are trying to solve. 
> The OAE is at an inflection point but the CLE is not at an inflection 
> point. The CLE has excellent governance and roadmaps and activities 
> that are well-aligned with its available resources. The CLE has a 
> strong and vibrant adopter community. I think that with Sakai 2.9 we 
> will see a product that can hold its own with *any * LMS in the 
> marketplace. The CLE does not need "Focus groups, steering committees, 
> surveys, evangelists and visionaries, connecting with the people that 
> have the skills,..." -- all of these ideas have been tried and all 
> they do is sap energy from the resources we do have and lead to 
> finding ourselves once again paralyzed and devoid of energy with no 
> apparent way out.
>
> The current CLE governance and Samigo governance is open to all that 
> want to truly contribute and willing to listen to any opinion from any 
> real stakeholder. The CLE efforts have an 18-month roadmap already and 
> are moving slowly and deliberately. Throwing in a bunch of 
> non-resourced brilliant ideas with no additional resources will only 
> cause frustration.
>
> We are *finally* after nearly ten years working on some of the 
> critical core issues in the Sakai CLE code base to make it more solid 
> and scalable. We can and should address usability issues along the way 
> -- but we need to be careful to put our energy into things that we can 
> actually accomplish with the resources we have.
>
> Having a focus group where we ask 50 people what would you like to see 
> in the Sakai CLE would be a complete waste of time -- the resulting 
> list of things would be impossible to achieve. If on the other hand we 
> took 50 long-term teacher and student users of Sakai and got them into 
> a room and asked them to tell us the top-10 within-tool usability 
> problems -- we might find a set fo things that could make the CLE a 
> better product *within* the recourse constraints we have.
>
> History has shown that it is *not harmless* to ask folks a wide-open 
> question about what they want and then when the resulting requests are 
> impossibly difficult and so they never get done. Be careful what 
> questions you ask...
>
> /Chuck
>
>
>
>
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