Boston Conference

Yesterday the Sakai Product Council met in person for the first time. Some common understandings emerged from our conversation, and those follow. I'll give one caveat: these are musings not declarations, despite my tendency toward deliverable-oriented (read:autocratic) language. It's the curse of keeping consultants from a large LMS company in line for the last two years.

• Max

Thoughts on the Sakai Product Council

We do not serve in this role as representatives of our institutions or companies; we act on behalf of Sakai in our Product Council Role.

Recap the stages: R&D --> Incubation --> Formal Product Development --> Maintenance --> End of Life

Our goal is to help the community make better decisions, not to make those decisions for the community. We evaluate the status of a project, and, for the 2.7 release at least, the Product Council will give it a thumbs up or thumbs down as far as whether or not it is ready to be included in the release. The release manager might subsequently choose to not include it in the release, for example a security issue might block a project from release.

To support this decision-making, we will develop a list of criteria with the community, then move quickly to provide specific examples of what each criterion would mean in implementation. The criteria will be developed from previous work within the community, including the Scorecard, with an eye towards balance. The list of criteria will be developed iteratively and in process with the projects themselves.

The list of criteria is a worksheet really, with the Sakai Product Council reviewing the worksheet.

For future re-architecting of Sakai we may seek to disentangle our approval of a project for release from the inclusion of that project in the default release distribution, or indeed in any specific default distribution. This statement anticipates demonstration distributions existing alongside LMS, repository and portfolio oriented distributions, along with possible free standing 'plug-ins'. For Sakai 2.7, we will not attempt such a disentanglement but will treat approval for release together with the release itself.

We anticipate working actively on at least one new project for 2.7

One goal is that within 3 years nothing the Product Council comes back to a project with will come as a surprise to any project lead.

This is not primarily a visioning body; this is a checks & balances body. The task of checking and balancing may well require creative judgment, but the vision for Sakai rests with the community, not with the Council.

The first active work the Sakai Product Council will undertake is the synthesis of the list of criteria from existing community resources, for delivery to the community.