Reorganization of DGs

Locating relevant information and figuring out where to ask questions about Sakai can be a challenge for newbies, sometimes even for seasoned Sakai veterans as well. To help improve the situation we plan to reduce the number of general discussions to a more manageable collection targeted at specific Sakai audiences (e.g., developers, instructors, researchers, user support, system administrators). These "forums" will be created mostly by aggregating the low-traffic Discussion Groups with related, higher-traffic sites (e.g., DG: Development, a.k.a. sakai-dev); or, for very topic-specific Discussion Groups, conversion to Working Groups.

The forums are a place for folks to ask questions of their peers who are most likely to have similar interests and developed similar experiences using Sakai. Posters should not feel limited, however, to just their "own" forum; indeed, many folks these days wear multiple hats and will feel comfortable participating in more than one forum. If you're not sure where to post a question, there is always the Open Forum, whose participants can help direct you to the right place to post your question, if not answer it outright.

Below please find the mappings of existing Sakai Discussion Groups to their new Sakai Forums. These groups will continue to have both a Collab Site (mostly for email list service) and a Confluence space (mostly for wiki-style documentation and discussion).

Forum	Discussion Groups (DGs)	Forum Description
Open	DG: Open Forum	This is the place where the Sakai Community can meet and talk about anything from technology to politics to funny Sakai stories. Even a little debate on some topic or another is OK. The only guideline is to be respectful of the other members of the group.
Announcement	DG: Announcements	News and announcements of general interest to the Sakai Community will be posted here. Review the Schedule for upcoming events. Resources include development documents, Sakai Newsletters and Videoconferences, and Presentations and Demonstrations. The hope is that this group will average a few messages per week so as to not overwhelm people's inboxes. If you only join one list in Sakai this is the right list to join. If you have any questions as to what is appropriate to announce to this list, send a note the Site Contact for this site.
Pedagogy	DG: Pedagogy DG: Assessment Tools	A place for professors, lecturers, instructors, teachers, etc. to ask questions, share best practicies and discuss the pedagogical uses of Sakai.
Researcher	DG: Research	A place for reasearhers, collaborators, etc. to ask questions, share best practicies and discuss the use of Sakai to support collaobration on research projects.
Library	DG: Library & Repositories	A place for folks to ask questions, share best practicies, and discuss the use and integration of Sakai with library resouces
User Support	DG: User	A place for user support folks to ask questions, share best practicies, and discuss supporting users of Sakai.
Developer	DG: Development DG: Content and Authoring DG: Enterprise DG: Portal DG: Web Video and Audio Tools	A place for designers, developers, evaluators, etc. to discuss and share information on the development of Sakai.
User Interaction	DG: User Interaction
Advocate	DG: Strategy and Advocacy

The following general groups and Discussion Groups were indentified as being very topic-specific in appeal and goals and are being converted to Working Groups.

Original Group	New WG
DG: European Sakai Community (EUROSAKAI)	WG: European Sakai
DG: I18N & L10N (I18N)	WG: I18N & L10N (I18N)
DG: Migration (MIG)	WG: Migration (MIG)
Documentation (DOC)	WG: Documentation
Management/Project Coordination (MGT)	WG: Project Coordination
DG: Portfolio (PORTFOLIO)	WG: OSP
DG: Production (PROD)	WG: Production
DG: Commerical Affiliates (DGSCA)	WG: Commercial Affiliates