This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Being open in open source work
Here's an interesting blog entry by Graham Attwell titled "Moodle and Sakai - Open Source alternatives?"
He notes the difference in the perceived openness between the Moodle and Sakai communities. I've seen some of the hostility toward Sakai here and there around the web, compared to the affection felt for Moodle.
Sakai planned in advance to have the initial "seed" application built by a few "core" universities who had each built their own course management systems in the past. The application would then be handed over to a foundation and become a more trditional open source project. We are nearing the end of those initial two years.
It's interesting that Sakai has been so good at generating positive buzz, and also at generating criticism. I think the secret to both was having a closed core group that reveals it's progress periodically.
Going forward it seems that it's going to be really improtant for Sakai to successfully transform itself from a closed core group to a truly open open source project. I'm reasonably optimistic - the change is starting already. Sakaipedia is a good indicator of Sakai's growing openess.
Tags: sakai opensource