Sakai Project Overview
Mellon Retreat NYC
March 28, 2005
Joseph Hardin,
University of Michigan,
School of Information,
Sakai Board Chair
(University of Illinois alum – Go, Illini)
KYOU / sakai
Boundary, Situation
The Sakai Project
“The University of Michigan, Indiana
University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal
Consortium, and the Open
Knowledge Initiative (OKI) are joining
forces to integrate and synchronize
their considerable educational
software into a pre-integrated
collection of open source tools.”
Sakai Project receives $2.4 million grant from Mellon
2
Sakai Funding
• Each of the 4 Core Universities Commits
– 5+ developers/architects, etc. under Sakai Board
project direction for 2 years
– Public commitment to implement Sakai
– Open/Open licensing – “Community Source”
• So, overall project levels
– $4.4M in institutional staff (27 FTE)
– $2.4M Mellon, $300K Hewlett (first year)
– Additional investment through partners
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Why: All the simple reasons
These are core infrastructures at our Universities
• Economic advantages to core schools, partners
• Higher ed values – open, sharing, building the
commons – core support for collaboration tech
• We should be good at this – teaching, research
are our core competencies; collab essential
• Maintains institutional capacity, independence
• Ability to rapidly innovate – move our tools
within/among HE institutions rapidly
Based on goals of interoperability Desire to harvest research advances and
faculty innovation in teaching quickly
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But, What is Sakai?
• Sakai is a project - a grant for two years.
• Sakai is an extensible framework - provides
basic capabilities to support a wide range of
tools and services – teaching and research
• Sakai is a set of tools - written and supported by
various groups and individuals
• Sakai is a product - a released bundle of the
framework and a set of tools which have been
tested and released as a unit
• Sakai is a community – an emerging group of
people and resources supporting the code and
each other, and learning how as we go
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Sakai Project Deliverables
Sakai Community – Committed and active
Working Code – CMS/CLE- Collaboration and Learning
Environment – Sakai 1.0
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Course management system – core tools plus
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Quizzing and assessment tools, [ePortfolio from OSPI], etc
Research collaboration system
Portal (uPortal 2.3, 3.x)
Modular tools - also pre-integrated to work out of the box
Tool Portability Profile
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Specifications for writing portable software to achieve
application ‘code mobility’ among institutions – modular tools
and services
Synchronized development, adoptions at Michigan,
Indiana, MIT, Stanford – Sakai 1.0 is the next
generation for CourseWork, CHEF, Oncourse,
Stellar
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Supporting the Class
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Supporting the Lab
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CHEF-Based NEESGrid
Software
NEES Chef -> Sakai 07/05
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Grid
Service
Stubs
NMI / OGCE
Portal
Portlets
And
Teamlets
Service
API
Grid
Protocols
Grid
Services
Local
Portal
Services
Remote
Content
Services
HTTP
Remote
Content
Servers
www.ogce.org
Jetspeed
Internal
Services
Figure 4: The revised portal architecture will provide a unified interface for
portal services.
NSF National Middleware Initiative
Indiana, UTexas, ANL, UM, NCSA
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Bringing the lab to the
classroom
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What is SAKAI?
• Sakai ≠ Course Management System
• Sakai = Collaboration & Learning Environment
Staff 1 Staff 2
Staff 3
Student
Student Student
Portal
Discussion
Forum
Resource
Management
Collaborative Project Portlet
Middle East
News Feed
Discussion
Forum
ASUC Middle East
Discussion Portlet
Use for teaching/learning/research and many other
online group activities.
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Software Progress to date
– Releases on time 1.0 (2004), 1.5 (last month)
– Production and pilots underway, in pipeline;
– 2.0 forming up nicely for June; recent meeting
between Tools Team, Architecture Team and
Board very good
– Processes being developed - organizational
methods evolving rapidly; release
engineering, distributed QA, contributions
acceptance models, definition of enterprise
bundle, methods for OS Core
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Sakai in Production at UM, IU Now
• We have about 25,000 people using CTools in at
least one course at UM. That is about ~54% of
candidate users at University of Michigan.
• There are over 1000 course sites representing
nearly 2000 sections this term.
• First semester of transition from CourseTools
Classic; transition complete Fall 2005, CTC
‘turned off’; then we are all Sakai/Ctools at UM
• Running on big cluster of commodity Dell boxes;
allows us to optimize as we provide stable
service to large community; frequent rolls for
updates
Doing fine…
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In production use
With >25,000 users
at U Michigan
Full Indiana Univ
production pilot
started in January
~4-5000 users
On to Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Foothill, MIT in 2005
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Known Pilots and Production
• Boston University School of
Management
• Carleton College
• Foothill-De Anza Community
College District
• Indiana University
• Johns Hopkins University
• Lübeck University of Applied
Sciences, Germany
• Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
• Northwestern University
• Rutgers
• Stanford University
• University of California,
Berkeley
• University of California,
Merced
• University of Cape Town, SA
• University Fernando Pessoa,
Portugal
• University of Lleida, Spain
• University of Michigan
• University of Missouri
• University of Virginia
• Whitman College
• Yale University
SEPP In Production
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Ctools – Production Sakai at University of Michigan
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Ctools – List of Worksites – Classes, Projects
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Site/class home page
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Site Resources area
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Discussion tool – Forums
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Email Archive
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Site Info – class list
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Sakai Community Activities
• Developer and Adopter Support
SEPP - Sakai Educational Partner’s Program
Community for ongoing dev, adoption, support
• Commercial Support – SCA, IMS, maybe SPA
Based on open-open licensing – open source, open for
commercialization- see ECL at sakaiproject.org
SCA – Fee-based services from vendors include…
• Installation/integration, on-going support, training
• Think of as “Sakai Red Hats”
IMS – working with other CLE/CMS vendors on
interoperability between frameworks
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Sakai Educational Partner’s Program
Developing the Community that’s Directing the
Source.
• Membership Fee: US$10K per year ($5K for smaller
schools), 3 years
• Access to SEPP staff
– Community development liaison
– SEPP developers, documentation writers
• Invitation to Sakai Partners Conferences
– Developer training for the TPP, tool development
– Strategy and implementation workshops
– Software exchange for partner-developed tools
• Seat at the Table as Sakai Develops
The success of the SEPP effort will determine
The long term success of the project.
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Sakai Educational Partners - Feb 1, 2004
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Arizona State University
Boston University School of Management
Brown University
Carleton College
Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of
Teaching
Carnegie Mellon University
Coastline Community College
Columbia University
Community College of Southern Nevada
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
Florida Community College/Jacksonville
Foothill-De Anza Community College
Franklin University
Georgetown University
Harvard University
Johns Hopkins University
Lubeck University of Applied Sciences
Maricopa County Community College
Monash University
Nagoya University
New York University
Northeastern University
North-West University (SA)
Northwestern University
Ohio State University
Portland State University
Princeton University
Roskilde University (Denmark)
Rutgers University
Simon Fraser University
State University of New York
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Stockholm University
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SURF/University of Amsterdam
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Tufts University
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Universidad Politecnica de Valencia (Spain)
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Universitat de Lleida (Spain)
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University of Arizona
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University of California Berkeley
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University of California, Davis
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University of California, Los Angeles
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University of California, Merced
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University of California, Santa Barbara
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University of Cambridge, CARET
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University of Cape Town, SA
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University of Colorado at Boulder
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University of Delaware
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University of Hawaii
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University of Hull
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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University of Minnesota
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University of Missouri
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University of Nebraska
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University of Oklahoma
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University of Texas at Austin
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University of Virginia
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University of Washington
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University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Virginia Polytechnic Institute/University
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Whitman College
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Yale University
In Process
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University of Melbourne, Australia
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University of Toronto, Knowledge Media Design27
Institute
The Sakai Community
• Main site: www.sakaiproject.org – outward looking
• Bugs: bugs.sakaiproject.org – open, active
• Sakai-wide collaboration area
– collab.sakaiproject.org; sakai work sites, discussion
lists, resources areas; working instance of Sakai
– sakai-dev@sakaiproject.org – open mail list, active
– sakai-user@sakaiproject.org – open mail list, active
• Sakai Educational Partners (SEPP)
– Separate mailing lists, discussion areas; for internal use
– Dedicated staff – technical and admin support
– Two conferences per year; regular VTCs, phone calls
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Working as a larger community Question Comes from the Public:
-- Messaggio Originale –
From: palantonio77@tiscali.it [mailto:palantonio77@tiscali.it]
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2004 7:20 AM
To: sakai-dev
Subject: Re: Add tools to a site
Antonio Palermo wrote:
I've developed a sakai tool ad I've registered it. To add this tool
in a site I manually added it in the file /usr/local/sakai/db/site.xml.
Now all works well.
Does exist a better way for adding tools to a site?
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Subject: RE: Add tools to a site
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 12:54:05 -0500 (EST)
From: Trevor Bradley <tgb@sfu.ca>
To: sakai-dev <sakai-dev@collab.sakaiproject.org>
Hello Antonio, I was going through the exact same problem
several weeks back. I also got trapped into the "Worksite Setup"
tool, which looks like it's hard-coded only to add a few set, sakai
core tools.
The procedure to add a new tool is:
Log in to your sakai server as admin/admin
Create a new site: Click "Sites" at the left sidebar, and fill in the
data fields
Create a new page: *Before* clicking Save, click the pages
button. (… and so on …)
Answer comes from a SEPP Partner.
Common occurrence now.
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Sakaipedia – Home Page
Filling growing need for info, and
To distribute effort of generating it.
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Top Level Structure
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Goals
• Provide an easy to maintain source of
information on Sakai in all of its aspects.
• Engage the Sakai community in creating
and maintaining content.
• Organize information to enable browsing
as well as keyword search.
• Establish a dialog around Sakai topics.
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Sakai KB – Experimenting with a local success
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Discussion Groups
Core of the OS Community
• Discussion Groups are the high level
organizational, and organizing, foci
• They are established as members show interest
by supporting and participating, and running
them
• They are your responsibility
• SEPP Staff is focused on support of these
If you want to see something happen, then make it
happen – Start out with the Discussion Group
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Importance of Discussion Groups
•Transparency
•Coordination
•Seed ground of ideas
•Competitive filter for ideas – peer review of suggestions
•High level chunking of interests and functional
relationships
•Spawning ground of Work Groups – where focus is
narrowed, and actual development stream begun – also
where efforts like support are centered (not all activities
are software development)
•WGs should be associated with a more general DG to
help communication – eg, UI Review Team (a WG)
should participate in the User Interface DG
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SEPP DG Leads
• SEPP Content and Authoring – Dirk Herr-Hoyman, University of
Wisconsin
• SEPP Cross Language – Tom Lewis, University of Washington
• SEPP Development – Mark J. Norton, Senior Technical Consultant
• SEPP Library & Digital Repositories – Bill Parod, Northwestern
University and Jim Martino, John Hopkins University
• SEPP Migration Strategy – Robert Catalano, Columbia University
• SEPP Requirements – Mara Hancock, University of Cal, Berkeley
• SEPP Strategy & Advocacy – Chuck Powell, Yale University
• SEPP User Interface – Malcolm Brown, Dartmouth University
• SEPP User Support - TBD
The people with the cool, unique logo on their shirts…
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Some Sakai Partner Projects
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The Berkeley Grade Book
University of California, Berkeley funded
development of an on-line grade book.
The UC Berkeley grade book is now in pilot
on the Berkeley campus as a stand alone
tool, and moving into pilot at IU.
It is part of the 1.5 release.
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Grad Tools
The University of Michigan’s Grad Tools provides
doctoral students a way of tracking their degree
progress from the point of choosing an advisor
to degree conferral.
Doctoral students create their own site, which
contains an automatically personalized
dissertation checklist based on data from their
department and from the graduate school.
Students control access to their Grad Tools site,
and use collaboration features common to
CTools, including file storage, group email, email
notification, structured discussion, and more.
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Samigo – Testing and Assessment
Part of 1.5 release
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Melete – Online Lesson
Authoring Tool
Foothill College’s Melete, an online lesson authoring
environment, is the classroom component of ETUDES
(Easy to Use Distance Education Software) that is being
rewritten in Java for Sakai-based ETUDES-NG. Melete
offers instructors the ability to author online learning
modules. Melete features extra controls to assist online
teachers/learners, such as the ability to set prerequisites
and the pacing of material.
The Hewlett Foundation funded deployment of Sakai for
the District-based service provided to 48 California
community colleges.
Part of 2.0 release
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Foothill College – Work with Sakai
Effort led by Vivian Sinou, Dean of
Distance & Mediated Learning
Foothill College
• Tools Development
• Skins Design
• Adoption & Implementation
• Pilots & Migration
• Training Workshops
• Performance Testing
With support from The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
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ETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots to Production
300 faculty from 17 community colleges
(highlighted in red on next slide) from the
ETUDES Alliance have committed to a pilot of
ETUDES-NG (Sakai 1.5 + Samigo + Melete) in
the spring and summer of 2005.
Three colleges will go into production in the fall.
More to follow in the spring.
All colleges will migrate to Sakai by July 1, 2007.
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ETUDES Consortium – Sakai Pilots
College of the Siskiyous
Members Outside CA
•Stephen F. Austin State
University, TX
•Harcum College, PA
Mendocino College
Santa Rosa Junior College
Lake Tahoe Community College
Vista College
Chabot College
Laney College
Skyline College
College of Alameda
Foothill College
Merritt College
San Joaquin Delta College
De Anza College
West Valley College
Porterville College
Gavilan College
Bakersfield College
West Los Angeles College
Taft College
Los Angeles South West
Antelope Valley College
Cerro Coso Community College
Los Angeles ITV
El Camino College
Crafton Hills College
Los Angeles City College
Glendale College
San Bernardino Community College
Los Angeles Harbor College
Long
Beach
CC
Los Angeles Pierce College
Coastline Community College
Los Angeles Mission College
Imperial Valley College
Los Angeles Trade Tech
Mira Costa College
Los Angeles Valley College
East Los Angeles College
* 300 faculty from 17 community colleges (highlighted in red) from the ETUDES Alliance have committed to
a pilot of ETUDES-NG (Sakai 1.5 + Samigo + Melete) in the spring and summer of 2005. Three colleges49
will
go into production in the fall. More to follow in the spring. All colleges will migrate to Sakai by July 1, 2007.
College Brand Skins at Portal Level
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Skins at Course Site Level
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Melete – Lesson Builder
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Composing content online
using a WYSIWYG Editor
Linking to websites to supplement
or support the content of a lesson
This is MELETE
Uploading all types of
documents for lesson
components/content
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Accessibility
metadata
Will plug in to TILE
from U Toronto.
Ability to check for lack of
compliance with Section 508
accessibility guidelines
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Student View – Navigation & Licensing
content
Navigation
is created
automatically
Authors can license their content
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Open Source Portfolio Initiative
(OSPI)
OSPI is a community of individuals and organizations
collaborating on the development of the leading open
source electronic portfolio software.
The Open Source Portfolio software is individual centric
enabling users to gather work products and other
artifacts to be stored and shared with others but more
importantly to be used for personal growth and
development. The ePortfolio toolset is being developed
on the Sakai infrastructure providing a stand alone
application as well as an integration of rich portfolio tools
in the full suite of Sakai applications.
Tracking Sakai releases – 1.5 and 2.0
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The Twin Peaks Project
Sun Microsystems, Inc. funded deployment of a
citation/link authoring tool by Indiana University.
The Twin Peaks project is an experiment in
providing a search and one click selection of
library electronic resources from within the Sakai
authoring tool. The interim tool demonstrated at
the December 2005 SEPP Conference provided
searching of EBSCO Academic Preimer, ERIC,
or the IU Libaries SFX enhanced online
catalog's electronic holdings.
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Search as part of
WYSIWYG Editor
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Building Contrib Community
• Receiving code fixes and folding them in
• Receiving large tools and figuring out how
to integrate them effectively
– XWiki
– Blog
– Jabber IM
– SCORM player
– RDF-based concept mapper
–…
Growing area. Necessary to achieve goal of
rapid innovation within mature system.
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Community Source Projects
“Community source describes a model for
the purposeful coordinating of work in a
community. It is based on many of the
principles of open source development
efforts, but community source efforts rely
more explicitly on defined roles,
responsibilities, and funded commitments
by community members than some open
source development models.”
“Community Investments
for ICommunity Outcomes”
Thanks to Brad Wheeler
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Reflecting on Our Efforts
• Open Source Projects are crucial to
supporting innovation in higher ed
• We have some examples now of ‘for
higher ed, by higher ed’ OS efforts
• A literature is developing around the
dynamics of open source communities
• What can we learn from experience and
add to our common stock of knowledge;
we are learning institutions, after all
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Mobilizing across communities
University missions of teaching/learning, research, service
• Sakai as online collaborative research tool
• Sakai as learning environment
• These communities often don’t know each other
– Source of duplicative efforts, uPortal, Jetspeed
– Source of useful variation, innovation
– Force standards to realize common benefits
• Communities can be co-mobilized to create critical mass
• Provide alternate, complementary, adoption paths
• Are software dev cultures different? Is this what allows
Sakai to think risky behavior natural sometimes?
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When Are Institutions Like People
In Community OS software development efforts
this is a central question
• Can you substitute institutional commitment for
individual motivations – if so, where?
– What does Weber say about this – core of micro
analysis – you oughta read Steven Weber, btw
– Can you use or leverage the similarities/differences
• Example of using institutional commitments to
speed development, resulting in ‘pumpkin
passing’, ‘bursty building’, with following remerging of code, releases
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Sakai QA Initiative
Distributing QA
• Task is to establish a set of distributed
methods for support of QA throughout the
Sakai lifecycle.
• Developing methods for a community
source effort; eg, Empirix contribution
• Others involved in this include people from
Indiana University, University of Michigan,
perhaps you (now over 25 people from
numerous schools).
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QA Testbeds Emerging
• Across the existing nightly build, stable
and production environments
– Used extensively in 1.5 release
• Larger Institutional Investments Coming
– At Foothill College
– At University of Michigan
• Cluster separate from dev, dev-test and production
• Will be available to larger community for load
testing; this summer, fall
Release engineering emerging as key
community effort, widening participation.
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Open Source Changing Us
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Moving across communities
Questioning value of hierarchy
Accepting, requiring responsibility
Adjusting stance to risk
Driving innovation from end-user through their
participation
Moving action to the edges – like the net
• Is OS changing us, and will we let it
• Universities good place to try these experiments
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Sakai’s Future – In Process
• Start-up grant ends December 31, 2005
• Long term state starting January 1, 2006
– Sakai Core joins SEPP; we are all SEPP now
– Governance is combination of representative (for
institutions - directions) and merit-based (like Apache
– core and tools) – TBD, topics of governance debate
– Core elements of Sakai are pretty stable (see 3.0)
– Sakai Project Team made up of SEPP, SCA funding
and contributed resources to maintain releases,
provide support, take contrib and rapidly evolve core
– central questions of what needed for this community
– ~$1-2 Mil/year staff and services budget needed; our
current guesstimate; under active discussion
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Two Kinds of Governance
• Governance of overall directions
– Processes of participation for institutions
– Driven by contributions of support
Provides high-level direction for core development
• Governance of code development
– Processes of participation for individuals
– Driven by contributions of code
All tool development becomes province of DGs
Role of core support is release of Sakai bundle,
and support of community processes.
Role of core developers is guiding of framework.71
Community building – Transitions
– Mellon Grant ending, core become SEPPers, SEPP growing
– Communications – Critical activities, spike with 1.5 release,
Sakaipedia, merging maillists, sites; new models moving forward
to distribute support as well as development;
– Governance – discussion in SEPP, June conference, transition
foundations, DG activity, Institutions/Individuals
– Sakai Core – what is needed to staff a vibrant OS project of this
type; delineation of needs from our experiences; business model
– Relations with other projects – OSPI, MELETE/Etudes, OKI,
TwinPeaks, Kuali, ‘contrib partners’
– Relations with vendors – developing, deepening;
announcements (rSmart/IBM), more on the way
– Relations with publishers – meeting at Sakai team meet in April
This coming year we reap the benefits of a
successful software effort; sow seeds of long
term community effort. No slowing down.
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Summer Conference 2005
Part of Community
Source Week
Conference Co-Chairs
SEPP Partners – Yale
and Cambridge
Technical Description of
2.0- 3.0 Dev &
Contrib Processes
Governance Discussion
Underway Now
Baltimore, MD
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Installing and Deploying Sakai
• Download Quick Start and follow
instructions - 5-10 minutes - this is a
developer edition with an in-memory
database (HSQLDB)
• Install a real database (MySql, Oracle) and
reconfigure Sakai to run in production
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Demo Sites
• Sakai - Collab.sakaiproject.org – running
Sakai 1.0 system; open
• Sakaiproject.org – open info site; gateway
to DGs and public forums
• Ctools – can get login if you want to
evaluate and see production system; very
similar to collab.sakaiproject.org
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Thanks
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