The group

If you're familiar with the Sakai project, an open-source Learning Management System (LMS) created in 2004 by some American universities, you may have heard at some point about the S2U group.

The S2U group (Sakai Spanish Users) was established in 2008 when several universities and a company in Spain using Sakai as a virtual classroom solution discovered that they shared many issues, concerns, and future plans. They thought that by joining forces, they could find solutions and progress faster than working individually. This approach aligned perfectly with the spirit of the open-source software they were using.

Looking back over 15 years later, there's no doubt that the idea worked. With a simple weekly online meeting lasting an hour to share information, review the group's work, and plan the next steps, the S2U has made significant advancements in the continuous improvement of the platform. They have contributed improvements in functionality, security, internationalization, and documentation. These advancements have been acknowledged with an increasingly prominent presence in the international community governing the project and multiple awards for its members from that community.

But in 2023, something novel happened to the S2U. Something that is perhaps the most positive development for a group overflowing with ideas and improvement proposals.

In 2023, we received funding.

The plan

The Unidigital plan suddenly appeared on the horizon. It was a plan developed by the Spanish Ministry of Universities for the modernization of its university system through the European Union's Next Generation Funds. Part of its financial support was aimed at "Boosting interuniversity projects of strategic and interdisciplinary digital innovation." There was nothing more "interuniversity" than the S2U group, and nothing more "strategic and interdisciplinary" than an LMS. Everything fit together like a puzzle, but quick action was needed.

The universities in the S2U group got to work. The effort was intensified, and they proposed a long list of improvements that could be implemented, among which stood out an integration of the Office365 platform with Sakai. A technical specification was drafted with all the requirements for each functionality. An estimated cost was assigned to each improvement, and an internal voting process narrowed down the list to the most interesting and feasible ones.

A competition was organized in record time, offering a budget of around 250,000 euros to any company that could integrate these improvements into a project that was technically very complex and used multiple frameworks. The company would need to adapt to the workflows of the international Sakai community, and the quality of the developed code would be reviewed and approved by the developers of that community. Afterward, it would be contributed to the project and become a permanent part of it. All this immense amount of work had to be completed in just one year. The challenge was enormous.

The work

The company "Entornos de Formación" (EdF), which had been part of the S2U from its inception, was possibly the only one that could take on this challenge, thanks to its previous experience in the project and its recognition in the community. It was not surprising that it was the only one to enter the competition and ultimately take responsibility for the work.

For technical reasons, it was decided that the work would be added in a separate branch of the project from the main one (the so-called "master" branch, which holds the most updated version of the code) to avoid incompatibilities with other developments. Once completed, these developments would later be contributed to the master branch.

Following the competition guidelines, all developments were documented in JIRA, the community's issue management system. A Quality Assurance (QA) server was set up where S2U members and anyone else could test the functionalities.

The weekly S2U meetings now included a section where Miguel Pellicer, CTO of EdF, detailed the progress of his team each week. If he needed any kind of community assistance, mainly testing, he would ask for it.

And so, step by step, the project was completed.

The result

Time has passed, and 2024 has arrived. The one-year deadline for completing the Unidigital projects turned out to be, to no one's surprise, insufficient, and an extra year of time was granted to all projects, a time they needed—except for the S2U project. EdF met the promised deadline and completed all developments on time. Only they know the effort it took to achieve this.

As of today, a significant portion of the project has been contributed to the master branch, and the remaining part is planned to be added very soon. Therefore, the next production-ready version released by Sakai will have all the functionalities of the Unidigital project added "out of the box," ready to be used by anyone installing the platform.

The international community has been eagerly anticipating seeing these developments in action, and now that they are, congratulations and praises keep pouring in for the S2U and EdF.

From the members of the S2U, I believe I speak on behalf of everyone when I say that we are happy and truly proud of what we have achieved and our contribution to an open-source project that can benefit educational institutions worldwide.

And who knows, things have gone so well that maybe we'll be given more funding.