[sakai2-tcc] Planning for Sakai 2.10 and beyond

[Berg, Alan]

Hi Chuck,

> 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.

CLE is resource starved. How would you translate this desire for improvement into Institutions volunteering resources for *central* change. How to convert non traditional organizations into visible contributing stakeholders. Surly, we need to expand the core team. Doesn’t that naturally imply a need to change process? Keeping the same track will slowly improve CLE, but at a slower pace than is needed by the wider market. What am I missing?

Alan


Alan Berg

Group Education and Research Services
Central Computer Services
University of Amsterdam
________________________________
From: sakai2-tcc-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [sakai2-tcc-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] on behalf of Charles Severance [csev at umich.edu]
Sent: 24 September 2012 15:14
To: Sakai Technical Coordination Committee 2
Subject: Re: [sakai2-tcc] Planning for Sakai 2.10 and beyond

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


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai2-tcc/attachments/20120924/2a095daf/attachment.html