The Sakai Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that was set up in late 2005 to encourage community building between academic institutions, nonprofits, and commercial organizations. It coordinates the release cycle and stimulates the ongoing health of the Sakai community by organizing and sponsoring conferences and fellowships. It manages the software creation life cycle, from development, through testing and quality assurance, to polishing the user experience.
Recognizing the need for best practices and a methodology for decreasing the learning curve for new tool developers, the Sakai Foundation, with the help of Aaron Zeckoski (http://aaronz-sakai.blogspot.com), set up the programmer's café.
The programmer's café is a set of lectures and hands-on programming labs focused on building new Sakai tools. By the end of the café, the programmers have learned enough to create their own masterpieces. The programmer's café is also about best practices and how to use the Eclipse programmers' IDE effectively.
Sakai conference organizers traditionally schedule the café for the day before the main conference presentations, and occasionally, a trainer delivers the café as a separate set of planned events. See http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/BOOT/home.
You can find the most up-to-date information on the Foundation's web site (http://sakaiproject.org), shown below. Notice the links to documentation and downloads. Foundation members work to ensure that the most current information possible is online.
Note
The motto: collaboration and learning for educators, by educators, free and open source, is not accidental. Much care has gone into creating an educationally supportive infrastructure that is free to download, change, and use as you like, with a clear vision of keeping this true for all time. The all-too common nightmare of IP trolls attacking your organization for licensing dues has no role here.
The development of the Sakai CLE has been date-driven with aggressive milestones and a transparent requirements process. The implication is that by the time you read this chapter, the next version of Sakai will be out. There will be more tools for users to choose from, many minor enhancements and performance improvements, numerous bugs spotted and removed, and much honest discussion at local and international conferences and especially in the mail lists.
There is a positive, intelligent, and constructive business-like atmosphere that surrounds the open, but sometimes difficult, discussions within the community.