1. Sakai Community and Technology Update
SUNY WIZARDS CONFERENCE, 01 MARCH 2006
ANTHONY WHYTE
SAKAI FOUNDATION / UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

2. Sakai in Ten Minutes WHAT IS SAKAI?
A COMMUNITY — a growing international alliance of universities, colleges and commercial affiliates working in open partnership with standards organizations like IMS and OKI and other initiatives like OSP's ePortfolio and JA-SIG's uPortal to develop open source enterprise-wide software applications to enhance collaboration, research and teaching within the higher education and research communities.
A FOUNDATION — the Sakai Project, supported generously by the Mellon and Hewlett Foundations and a number of founding members of Sakai, has given way to the non-profit Sakai Foundation, a community-funded and community-sustaining institution fostering innovation and a common, open approach to software development and distribution.
A FRAMEWORK — The Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) is an open-source, extensible framework for building and deploying enterprise-wide collaboration, teaching and research tools and services. It supports a variety of constituencies within higher education and beyond-- students and instructors, researchers, project teams and work groups. Sakai's CLE offers interoperability, reliability and scalability in a system that is free to acquire, use and modify.
AN IRON CHEF — the famous Hiroyuki Sakai
Kitchen analogy favored by SUNY participants -- IRON CHEF rules

3. Why choose Sakai? COMMUNITY SOURCE MODEL — THE VALUE PROPOSITION
Academic Institutions
Control your own destiny — share in software development, distribution and ownership and sidestep limitations imposed by proprietary software.
Leverage leadership in teaching and learning — harness the intellectual capital resident within higher education to produce innovative software solutions for higher education.
Get back more than you give — achieve developmental economies of scale and cost savings implicit in inter-institutional cooperation and collaboration.
Higher education knows the problem space.
Commercial Organizations
Gain new clients — establish and deepen business relationships within a growing academic community of Sakai adopters.
Enhance brand/name recognition — leverage the growing interest in open source software solutions in general and Sakai in particular to elevate one’s business profile in the marketplace.
Generate revenue — develop new revenue streams by providing goods and services to the Sakai community (e.g., implementation and integration, consulting, hosting and support services, custom tool development).

4. The Sakai Project A BIT OF HISTORY, 2003-2005 Sakai 1.0.0
Founding members — the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford University in partnership with uPortal and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI).
Goals — implement Sakai, adopt Open/Open licensing, share software ownership, contribute 5+ team members under board direction for two years; build community; secure funding, achieve sustainability.
Funding — $4.4 million by institutional staffing (27 FTEs), $2.4 million Mellon and $300,000 Hewlett grants, additional investment through partners.
Releases — 1.0 (Oct 04); 1.5 (Mar 05); (May 05); 2.0 (June 05); (Aug 05); 2.1 (Dec 05; (Feb 06).
Sakai 1.0.0

5. Sakai Community Diverse, robust and growing (100+)
New Partners (Oct present)
University College, Dublin (Eire)
University of Chicago (USA)
Tulane University (USA)
Apple, Inc.
Pearson Education
Charles Sturt University (Australia)
University of Limerick (Eire)
University of Oslo (Norway)
Michigan State University (USA)
University of Auckland (New Zealand; pending)
Sakai is free to acquire, use and modify. Joining the community formally as a dues-paying partner is not required.

6. Sakai Foundation
NON-PROFIT CORPORATION FORMED IN OCTOBER 2005 TO SERVE THE SAKAI COMMUNITY
Governance
Ten board members elected by community representatives to serve three year terms. Empowered to represent the community publicly, manage Sakai’s IP, coordinate software design, development and distribution processes and act as “court of final appeal” on issues of contention between community work groups.
Board Members
Joseph Hardin, Univ. of Michigan
Brad Wheeler, Indiana University
Mara Hancock, Univ. of CA, Berkeley
Lois Brooks, Stanford University
Vivian Sinou, Foothill College
Budget
Annual budget of approximately $1 million (USD) covering:
4-6 staff positions
Bi-annual conferences
Income
Annual community partner contributions of $10, (USD)
($5, per annum (USD) for smaller academic institutions)
Ian Dolphin, Univ. of Hull
Jutta Treviranus, Univ. of Toronto
John Norman, Univ. of Cambridge
Charles Severance, Univ. of Michigan
Chris Coppola, rSmart Group
Example staff may include: Executive Director, CTO & Architect, Administrative Support,
Framework Development & Architecture, Communications Manager,
Partner Tech Support & Documentation, QA & Release Manager.
Sakai Fellows program
Outreach activities

7. Sakai License EDUCATIONAL COMMUNITY LICENSE
Sakai licensing permits commercial and non-commercial use of the software without any fees or encumbrance.
Sakai uses the Education Community License, a variant of the BSD license. It is designed to encourage a wide range of use including the production of derivative work in the commercial space.

8. Sakai Distributed Development
SAKAI 2.1: AN INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVE
Developers
Individual committers = 36
Academic Institutions = 10
Commercial Partners = 2
Continents = 4
Developers: (Asia, Africa, Europe, North America)
QA: (Africa, Europe, North America) QA
Individuals testers = 52
Academic institutions = 27
Continents = 3

9. Sakai Production Statistics
EARLY ADOPTERS
Other Schools in Production
Univ de Lleida
Walsh University
In Production by Fall 2006
Arizona State
Boston Univ, Schl of Mgmt
Foothill College
Portland State
Stanford University
Univ of California, Berkeley
Univ of Cambridge
Virginia Tech
Pilots
Columbia University
Hong Kong Univ of Sci. and Tech.
Johns Hopkins University
MIT
Northwestern University
Rice University
Roskilde University
Rutgers
Texas State
SURF, Univ. van Amsterdam
Univ. of British Columbia,
Land and Food Systems
Univ of California, Davis
Univ Fernando Pessoa
Univ of Missouri
Univ of Nebraska-Lincoln
Univ of North Texas
Univ of Virginia
Whitman College

10. SAF—Presentation Services
Sakai Framework (SAF)
KERNAL, COMMON SERVICES, PRESENTATION SERVICES
SAF—Presentation Services
Framework
Application
Abstract Tool Layout
Tool Code (Java)
Tools
Responsible for GUI presentation;
Built-in persistence mechanisms prohibited
Services
Documented API required
Access other services via APIs only (not data models)
Presentation agnostic
Framework
Registrar for tools and services
Provider of common capabilities
No knowledge of domain objects
A SOA architecture.
Kernel - An augmented web application which enables the Sakai APIs to be called from the web application - this is a rich but not constraining environment - insures that Common services are portable.
Common Services - A set of common services available to all tools (authentication, authorization, hierarchy, repository, others)
Presentation Services - A set of Sakai specific JSF tags to handle presentation details and provide widgets such as a date-picker or WSYWIG editor.
Service
Interface (APIs)
Application Services
SAF—Common Services
SAF—Kernel

11. Sakai Tools SAKAI 2.1.1 ENTERPRISE TOOLS AND SERVICES Enterprise Tools
Upcoming release will feature OSP portfolio integration
SAKAI ENTERPRISE TOOLS AND SERVICES
Melete
Enterprise Tools
Announcements
Assignments
Chat Room
Threaded Discussion
Drop Box
Archive
Gradebook
Message Of The Day
News/RSS
Preferences
Presentation
Profile/Roster
Quiz & Tests
Resources
Schedule
Section Mgmt
Syllabus
Web Content
Worksite Setup
WebDAV
Provisional Tools
Melete (content editor)
Roster
RWiki
SU (Super User)
Sakaiscript (web services)
TwinPeaks (external repository searching while using the WYSIWG editor)

12. The Future NEW TOOLS, SERVICES AND TECHNOLOGIES Short Term Long Term
Accessibility improvements
Blog
IMS Tool Interoperability
MailTool
Message Center
TwinPeaks refinements
Pluggable WYSWIG
RSS
Hierarchy
CourseManagement API
Section aware tools
JSR-168 Portlet
WSRP Consumer
WSRP Producer Portal
Portal friendly tool id URLs
Unit Test Framework
Long Term
Sakai/uPortal integration
Enhanced LAMS integration
IMS Content Packaging Import/Export
IMS Common Cartridge
JSR-170 Java Content Repository
Lucene
SCORM support
RDF Resource Description Framework support
OWL Web Ontology Language support (Semantic Web)
JSR-168 = specification defining a set of APIs for Portal computing addressing the areas of aggregation, personalization, presentation and security.
WSRP = Standardizing presentation-oriented Web services for use by aggregating intermediaries, such as portals

13. Sakai and LAMS INTEGRATION DEVELOPMENTS Sakai/LAMS Walkthrough
In October 2005 the LAMS Foundation announced plans to integrate Sakai and LAMS. In November 2005 source code and a binary distribution were released.
Charles Severance, Sakai Chief Architect, travels to Australia in two weeks to map out a tighter tools integration strategy with the LAMS team.
LAMS Learning design and learning sequencing tools
Sakai/LAMS Walkthrough

14. Sakai, uPortal and Banner Integration
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MERCED
UC Merced adopted an “out of the box” configuration strategy to simplify integration efforts and shorten the rollout time frame.
Sakai is integrated as a single portlet (iFrame in this case). The portal has no awareness of course rosters and roles -- Banner integration is limited to Sakai. In contrast, Merced’s UCB Mail is exposed via an iChannel portlet rather than a JSR-168 portlet.

15. SUNY SLN 2.0 Open Source Strategy
U-PORTAL, LAMS, SAKAI, OpenLDAP
SLN Deploy uPortal, LAMS and Sakai. uPortal and Sakai are production ready and available to commence the transition from SLN 1.0 starting Fall uPortal serves as the single point of contact for users; Sakai is integrated into uPortal via a JSR-168 portlet. LAMS integration is deferred to SLN 2.1 but is introduced to the SUNY community in a pilot program.
The strategy is conservative and permits SLN to focus on other transition issues such as deployment, performance, data conversion and training.
SLN Integrate LAMS into the Portal; connect Sakai to LAMS. LAMS provides alternate “view” knitting Sakai and non-Sakai capabilities together.

16. finis