In a very real sense, Sakai is not only a software application, but an active community of educational institutions working together to solve common problems, share best practice, and innovate. The professional development and cross-institutional knowledge sharing are benefits that can be hard to find elsewhere.
The vibrant, open source community has a structured management and strong commercial support. The central pillar is the Sakai Foundation (http://sakaiproject.org/sakai-foundation).
Sakai is open sourced under the Educational Community License, currently version 2 (http://opensource.org/licenses/ecl2.php). This allows commercial partners to provide hosting, support, and custom modifications, and lets developers work with the full code base. In contrast, a proprietary license would have slowed down deployment and held back the development and wider support.
The benefits of open source for Sakai users are profound. You can handle and manipulate the code without having to worry about accidentally violating any commercial license. Advanced developers can learn through the review and issue process. Bugs are more amenable to resolution locally and transparency also supports innovation, quality, and security (many eyes).
The Sakai open source community is confident, open, and not afraid to show the good, the bad, or the ugly. An Amsterdam University-based QA server automatically tests the main parts of the source code for bugs three times a day and publishes a report at the end of each test (http://qa1-nl.sakaiproject.org/codereview) that is viewable by the whole universe, and a couple of parallel ones as well. Anyone can download the source code and send modifications to a branch manager.
Different organizations have different timelines for patching and updating their production servers. The source code of Sakai is evolving fast and, once or twice a year, the foundation releases a new, major version of Sakai. Some organizations do not have the time or resources to upgrade, but do want to patch their servers for known bugs and security issues. To achieve this, the community branch manager copies the source code into another part of the source code repository (this is called branching). The branch manager for the older code is responsible for updating with patches, leaving newer code in a different branch to evolve.
Being a branch manager is quite a lot of work and it is easy to make mistakes. If you see one of this endangered species at a conference, pat him or her on the back, make encouraging noises, and try not to look at his or her graying hair and the stress lines on his or her face.
Workgroups are smaller communities of practice within the larger Sakai community; Parties with a shared interest gather information and requirements on Confluence to share advice and best practices with the community. Confluence is a Wiki, a place where a large number of contributors can change the content without central editorial control.
Visit the main page of the Sakai Confluence (http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/dashboard.action) and you will see a list of workgroups mixed in with other links on the left side. The workgroups meet online in person, the latter usually at conferences. Workgroups exist for developers, quality assurance, management of the software life cycle, the user experience, teaching practices, and so on.
The e-mail lists from the various workgroups are also viewable to the world and there are no limits on who can subscribe. In general, the community responds quickly to the mails sent to the lists.
Note
A full list of workgroups with descriptions is included in Chapter 16,Participating in the Sakai Community
Official Sakai FAQ
The site http://sakaiproject.org/new-sakai-faq is very readable and is a good jumping off point for further study. It contains many useful and up to date links as well.
The architects have not just designed Sakai to be a place for excellent online learning experiences; it is also a platform for easy development, especially of tools. At least 100 developers are actively enhancing Sakai directly or through contributions for local deployments right now.
Development may at first seem daunting for tool builders. However, the basic skills needed to create a tool are the same as those for building a standard web application. Most developers within the Sakai community use the industry-standard Eclipse IDE http://www.eclipse.org). There is a wide range of supporting material to help — and the best resource of all is the Sakai community.
It is beyond the scope of this book to go into the detail of setting up your development environment. However, you will find relevant links in Glossary B.
Note
Tool creation
For those of you who are interested in tool creation, the online Development Environment Setup document (http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/BOOT/Development+Environment+Setup+Walkthrough) is a necessary read.
Sakai is a project where individuals have a large degree of influence. If you have a good idea and are prepared to spend your time discussing the details in the Distribution Groups, then you can influence change, redirect community effort, and help build a great product.
Outstanding achievement is rewarded through Sakai Fellowships. Sakai fellows are experts in their given fields and valuable sources of experience, which they share within the wider Sakai community. A fellowship lasts for one year, awarded at each International Sakai conference. Therefore, by the time you read this chapter, another crop of fellows may have been chosen. However, in the eyes of many of the community, once you are a fellow, you are always a fellow; your expertise and commitment does not magically disappear at the end of the fellowship. It is a hard-earned award with many viable competitors.
Sakai fellows fit across a broad range of categories such as the developer, teacher, tester, and administrator, with the boundaries blurred for most of the fellows.
A current list of Sakai fellows can be found on the main Sakai website at: (http://www.sakaiproject.org/sakai-fellows). A large proportion of the fellows mentioned have a bias towards coding and you can see their work every time you use Sakai. As Sakai matures, expect this natural bias to change, as educators gain a greater community voice.