[sakai2-tcc] Planning for Sakai 2.10 and beyond

[Steve Swinsburg]

I agree Chuck, there have been mistakes made in the past in the management
space. But let us learn from those mistakes, we don't need to repeat them.
Not all management is bad - we can gain a huge amount by doing as Vanilla
Ice said we should do, "stop, collaborate and listen", checking in on what
the market is doing and what the users of our system want, gathering
requirements and then going from there.

My reply to your reply on the blog post:

Thanks for the comment Chuck. The problem we need to address is that Sakai
is losing ground to other LMSs and we need to re-establish ourselves.
Perhaps inflection point is not the correct analogy, plateau is perhaps a
better word. I’m not seeing the drive and vision that people once had.

People DO find it difficult to get started in development, they DO find it
difficult to get an install off the ground and more and more code and
awesome new features are being locked away in local/vendor repositories and
not contributed back to the community. These are huge barriers to adoption
and to progress.

The CLE does have a fantastic community, and that is why I devote so much
of my energy into this project, but there is no CLE roadmap beyond the
current release. At the conference we talked about issues that should be
addressed for 2.10, but the large majority of them are technical issues
that we, as developers, would like fixed. The closest thing is the wish
list that came out of the post conference meetings here:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/TCC/TCC+Atlanta+2012+Conference+Meetings

This isn’t what I am talking about.

A crucial part of what I wrote is this:
“We need to … see what it is that teachers and students want from an
environment, and how we can deliver that.”

We need to ask the right people, the people we want using our products,
what they want from this system – included in that can be their top ten
annoyances/usability problems. That sort of constructive feedback is SO
valuable, but it doesn’t happen often enough. Developers rarely know what
users want unless they ask. The survey that the TCC sent out earlier in the
year asking what version of Sakai people are using/will be upgrading to was
a perfect example of engaging the community in a simple and unobtrusive
manner, yet yielded vitally important information to help plan releases. We
need more of those.

I still firmly believe that we need some form of management and guidance to
drive the requirements gathering process and move the CLE forward. A lack
of management is just as bad as being over managed in my opinion. The TCC
does a great job at handling the low level technical details, but it takes
a cautious approach which needs to change. And there needs to be a separate
structure which guides the top level requirements, and ideally, provides
resources to get them implemented.

Going forward, what I would really love to see is a period of consultation,
requirements gathering and community engagement, an extended period of
active development to get new features in and old code removed/rewritten, a
version bump (reclaim the 3 – CLE 3), incremental minor releases of 2.8 and
2.9 to keep adopters happy, to go mad on test fests and file/fix as many
jiras as possible, and then to unleash a re-energised, stable and scalable
CLE with a beautiful and consistent UI.

cheers,
Steve


On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 11:51 PM, Charles Severance <csev at umich.edu> wrote:

>
> On Sep 24, 2012, at 9:32 AM, Berg, Alan wrote:
>
> 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,
>
> What you are missing is that other than the original Mellon funding every
> single "donation" to any Sakai effort has come with so many strings
> attached that it is a net reduction in resources.  In OAE schools gave
> $200K - not to get $10K back in value - they gave $200K to get $1000K back
> in value - but unfortunately everyone's $1000K was different and
> non-overlapping - hence you end up with the "The Producers" scenario:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Producers_(1968_film)
>
> Where the only winning strategy is to fail.
>
> If you create some kind of central governance with the purpose of making
> sure that when schools or companies give resources, they "get their money's
> worth" and force volunteer developers to *report* to that political
> structure - it ends up being a political quagmire and completely
> disassociated with what the product and overall community really needs and
> the volunteer developers become bitter and leave and then when the
> governance gives up and folds - you have lost the volunteer developers.
>  OAE lost its way in a sea of competing short-term local priorities.
>
> We must resist the notion that the failed OAE governance is allowed to
> re-install itself atop the CLE.  They had four years of all the love of the
> Sakai movers, shakers, board, and the former executive director and $3-4
> Million dollars and yet they still failed.  Why are we then advocating to
> adopt their structure atop the CLE?
>
> We do not want *any* money or *any* people with strings attached.  They
> turn out to be anchors that drag us down to our death.
>
> Alan, I am not going to stand by silently let this happen a third time.
>  The hot--air merchants have had clear sailing in this community for four
> years and all they did was steer us onto the rocks.  Their time is at an
> end.
>
> /Chuck
>
>
>
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