In 2004, the Mellon Foundation provided seed funding for a group of four top universities in the United States—University of Michigan, Indiana University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University—to collaborate to create an open source teaching, learning, and academic collaboration software platform. The University of California at Berkeley joined the effort, soon thereafter. And, so, Sakai was born. Today, hundreds of individuals of universities, schools, and corporations all around the world are involved in building Sakai. And millions more use Sakai as an everyday part of their teaching, learning, and research at educational institutions around the world.
This book is primarily a practical guide to installing, configuring, and using the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE). You will learn a lot about the Sakai CLE as you read this book and will begin to understand why so many top universities have chosen to deploy Sakai. But there is more to the story than just an enterprise software application. Before diving into the practical material it is worth spending a few minutes familiarizing yourself with the other three ingredients that make up the Sakai project: the Sakai community, the open source license that Sakai uses, and the Sakai Foundation.
This information is not simply interesting background material. As you begin to use Sakai you will undoubtedly be drawn to the Sakai email lists, Wiki, and blogs written by Sakai contributors. Understanding this context will aide your interactions with members of the Sakai community.
Open Source software efforts are organized in a variety of different ways. Some, like MySQL, are driven primarily by a single commercial organization. Others, like Linux, are built from the diverse contributions of many individuals and organizations and often led by a "benevolent dictator". The Sakai community fits neither of these descriptions exactly but, instead, is a co-operation amongst educational institutions, commercial organizations, and independent individuals all working collaboratively to build the Sakai CLE. Often an organization will commit the time of its staff members to participate in Sakai. In other cases, individuals volunteer their time to contribute something of value.
The Sakai community as a whole, not a single organization or individual, is responsible for all aspects of evolving the Sakai CLE. There is no central decision maker, which places a premium on communication and determining the best way forward based on the merits of the idea. The Sakai CLE is truly designed by education, for education. These community members, who generally work at educational institutions around the world, sit extremely close to the end users of Sakai. Members of the Sakai community believe this community-driven development model inevitably leads to the best product for use on campus. So when you interact with the Sakai community you should keep in mind that nobody is "in charge"—your contributions will be accepted based on their value and the time and effort you have to contribute.
This community is fundamental to Sakai's value. Sharing product development, academic, and e-learning best practices with peers around the world is a unique aspect of Sakai, a rare cross-institutional collaboration in higher education information technology. For many organizations and individuals, this aspect of Sakai is as important as the functionality of the software itself.
Sakai is distributed as free and open source software. Access to this code is extremely valuable to those who want to customize their on-campus instance or wish to develop innovative new tools. But open source code is important to the entire Sakai community. The ability to make that one change to the code for your campus can be crucially important and that change can be added to the Sakai code base, removing the need for customization as you upgrade. And the source code serves as the ultimate insurance policy, ensuring that you aren't locked into a single vendor.
Sakai uses the Educational Community License (ECL), a minor variant of the Apache License. This licence is commercial friendly because it allows the Sakai code to be extended and bundled with proprietary code and re-distributed—it allows use of the source code for the development of proprietary software as well as free and open source software (of course the original Sakai code in any such commercial re-distribution remains free and open source). This distinguishes Sakai from open source projects that use the GPL license, which requires that any released extensions to the software also be free and open source. In part because of this license, Sakai has attracted a variety of well-known commercial partners including IBM and Oracle.
The Sakai Foundation is a member supported non-profit corporation with a small staff and modest budget. It was created in 2006 when the original Mellon funding for Sakai had run its course. Those involved in the Sakai effort wanted a small organization to continue to coordinate the activities of the community.
While membership in the Foundation is optional, approximately 100 organizations around the world support the foundation so that it can continue its important community activities. These include managing the intellectual property of Sakai, organizing conferences and planning meetings, maintaining the Sakai technology infrastructure including the bug tracking system and project Wiki, coordinating development activities and quality assurance, publishing the Sakai CLE releases and functioning as a public advocate for Sakai.
It is time to get started. Chapter 1 provides a good overview of the Sakai software and a little more detail on the history of Sakai and the Sakai community. After that it's feet first into the software itself—you'll have a Sakai demo up and running by the end of Chapter 2. From that point it's up to you. Readers with a technology background will certainly be interested in the chapters, Setting up Sakai and The Administration Workspace. Tools, Tools, Tools is important information about the wide variety of tools that are available in Sakai and is important for getting the most out of Sakai. Using Sakai For Teaching and Collaboration will be of special interest to anyone using Sakai or supporting Sakai end-users. And Sakai at its Best provides many case studies and examples of Sakai in use. In many ways that is the most important chapter in the book because it demonstrates that so much of the value of using Sakai comes from being part of the community. By reading this book your taking a first (or another) step into that community. Welcome aboard!