LA Sakai CLE Project Coordination

Details

• Date: Sunday, June 12th
• Location: Santa Anita BC room in Westin Bonaventure Hotel
• Time: 9am - 5:30pm. - Lunch will graciously be provided by the Sakai Foundation

Notes

Notes during the discussion will be captured in etherpad:   http://etherpad.ctools.org/CLEPROJCOR-2011-06-12

Afterword a summary will be posted to the bottom of this page and sent out to the Sakai distribution lists.

Agenda

We will be dividing up the project meeting into several moderated discussions on the following topics:

Notes http://etherpad.ctools.org/CLEPROJCOR-2011-06-12

Attendees

Summary to community

Colleagues,

   On Sunday, June 12^th a group met in person to discuss opportunities and challenges within the CLE community.  

One discussion strove to build consensus about changes to the next CLE minor release, 2.9.0, and the following proposals are being circulated to the community for additional comment: 

• Inclusion of NeoPortal.  
  • The chat showcased with this new portal should be disabled until the technology is reviewed and performance tested  
• Inclusion of Lesson Builder, a way to structure content, will be included in provisional  (ie stealthed) status
• Inclusion of Mailsender, a drop-in replacement for the deprecated Mailtool, as a core tool
• CKeditor will be the default editor for 2.9
• Inclusion of News Feeds as a core tool and the deprecation of the current New tool
• Inclusion of soft delete for sites & resources
• End support for Oracle 9i going forward (in the 2.8.x code line, this would begin with 2.8.1)
• Recommended version of MySQL is minimally 5.1
• Recommended JDK is minimally 1.6
• Upgrade to Tomcat 7
• Upgrade to JSF 1.2 version (dependency on upgrade of Tomcat 7)
• Adoption of a release schedule [1] that closely mirrors that of 2.8.0

Additionally, these are areas where the group was aware of significant work but needs to review further prior to consideration for inclusion in 2.9:

• Blogs
• Roster

Many topics not tied to a specific release and/or relating to fostering the CLE ecosystem were discussed throughout the rest of the day.    Below is a quick summary of each of discussion that identified steps forward. 

 

Sakai.Properties

Currently there is no definitive list of all properties (ie sakai.properites) and results in implementers not knowing the possibilities with the Sakai CLE product.  Going forward, more discussion needs to occur to look at how this can be best accomplished

Revised Build

We discussed a proposal for improving the current build and release process in order to provide a more efficient workflow. Some minor changes will be further described and tested. 

Confluence

There is a large amount of out of date/ inaccurate information currently in Confluence.   The community needs to have authoritative documentation; particularly in the areas like “Getting Started”  (ie for faculty, admins), marketing materials, and with release information like release notes, system admin guides, ect .

Confluence has been central to the community and a section of confluence with restricted write access needs to be established.   Other spaces will be tagged to indicate that they are community contributions.  Longer term out of date information should be moved into accessible archive location to preserve the history of the project.

JIRA

The group discussed proposals for addressing the large backlog of JIRA issues, such as providing a workflow for JIRA, better communicating the existing process to the community, and some other minor improvements.

Work toward building the CLE Development team

There have been many teams (RM, MT, Project Leads) working within the CLE.   It’s time to start bringing these groups together to build a cohesive team.

A proposal for combining the Release Management & Maintenance Team calls into one “CLE Development Team” call every couple of weeks. These meetings would include both structured agenda and opportunities for questions and mentoring. Additional ideas for improving participation on the maintenance team were discussed, including what has and has not worked in the past.

Sakai 2.10.0 Brainstorming

The group spent about an hour brainstorming areas to focus on for a 2.10.0 CLE release.  Ideas shared during this time included: Session failover, import/export of content, improve the UI across the toolset, better stack trace error handling, move from using state to urls , QoS request, worker queue, gradebook and better UI support for large classes.  A theme that emerged during this discussion was that addressing the top 10 places for each of the afore mentioned topics would move us to a significantly better place in terms of enhancing the CLE’s place in the market place.

Other Topics

The project coordination meeting ended with updates and status on several focus areas, including internationalization, accessibility and documentation.

Additional information about each of theses topics as well as the notes from the day are available off the agenda in Confluence [2].   

We want to encourage and welcome questions, comments and additional considerations.   

Thanks!

Megan May

Sakai CLE Technical Coordination Committee (TCC) Chair

Beth Kirshner

Sakai CLE  Technical Coordination Committee (TCC) Vice Chair

[1] Proposed 2.9.0 Schedule

[2] LA CLE Project Coordination