Open Source software efforts are organized in a variety of different ways. Some of them are driven primarily by a single commercial organization. Others, like Linux, are a result of a diverse contribution of many individuals and organizations and are often led by a "benevolent dictator". The Sakai community fits neither of these descriptions but, instead, is at its core, a collegial alignment of educational institutions and commercial organizations, working collaboratively to build the Sakai software. Often an organization will commit the time of 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 Sakai software. There is no central decision maker, which places a premium on communication in determining the best way forward based on the merits of the idea. Sakai software is designed truly 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 that this community-driven development model leads to the best product for use on campus, shortening the distance between identifying the need for innovation and its realization. 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 put into contributing.

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 cited as the reason they choose to participate, and is at least 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. However, 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. In addition, 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 license is commercial friendly because it allows the Sakai code to be extended and bundled with proprietary code and re-distributed — it allows the 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 the open source projects that use the GPL license, which require that any released extensions to the software should also be free and open source. In part, because of this license, Sakai has attracted a variety of well-known commercial partners, small and large, including IBM and Oracle. This growing network of Sakai Commercial Affiliates is an important part of the Sakai ecosystem, providing institutions with a range of choices as to how Sakai software is supported.

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 70 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, and publishing the Sakai CLE releases and functioning as a public advocate for Sakai.

Since the first edition of this book, much has happened. The Sakai Foundation is in discussion with another open source community working in higher education - Jasig. The planned merger of Sakai and Jasig promises a wealth of opportunity for further community collaboration and product improvement.

A product range is emerging with the creation of Sakai OAE, a socially aware educational platform that complements and expands the capabilities of the Sakai CLE. These two applications will work well together via what is known as hybrid mode. The whole will be better than the sum of parts.

Sakai CLE is a hardened product, forged in the fire of mission critical use. Expect large scale community support for many years and a continued expansion to the feature set. Expect also a continued focus on quality and operational stability.

Change is the norm and so is production stability. Watch this space (http://sakaiproject.org/).

It is time to get started. Chapter 1 provides a good overview of the Sakai CLE 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. Though the book there is important information about the wide variety of tools that are available in Sakai and what 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 Show Cases 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, you are taking a first (or another) step into that community. Welcome aboard!

Ian Dolphin

Executive Director at Sakai Foundation