Suzanne Thorin
Dean of University Libraries
Indiana University
James L. Hilton
Associate Provost for Academic
University of Michigan
In its first eleven months, the Sakai Project has delivered a 1.0 production quality Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE), will release 1.5 in December, has built a Partner’s Program with over 50 distinguished colleges and universities, and has multiple companies providing commercial support for the community source software. This open source collaboration among the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, and Stanford is demonstrating a promising model for pooling institutional investment to develop community source software. A number of related projects including SAMigo, OSPI’s ePortfolio, Twin Peaks, Grade Book, Community Portals for Sciences, National Middleware Initiatives, and others are building around the Sakai architecture.
This briefing will provide a project update on the production deployment at the University of Michigan and the pilot rollout at Indiana University. The session will address the project roadmap for the 1.5 (December 2004) and 2.0 (May 2005) software releases and progress in bringing digital library resources into the Sakai environment. Sakai’s “open-open” licensing using the Educational Community License is developing a thriving community for extensible software in education. The Sakai Project has received considerable support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.