Sakaidelic Musings

This isn't a post about Sakai specifically, since its a community-source project, which means its project management-related issues are of a slightly different flavor. However, anyone who works in IT (and who doesn't these days?) has probably heard the words "compliance" and "auditors," along with a good dose of "project management" and "portfolio management." Although they're separate issues, compliance needs seem to drive adoption of project management practices, since they're the main way work is (supposed to be) organized, documented and carried out.

Sure, everyone wants to document, do the right thing, and make sure we're doing what we say we're doing, but how to balance that with innovation, creativity and productivity?

Some interesting thoughts from Tom Grant at Xythos:

...no one wants to live in a world where they waste time documenting what work they did today, archiving that documentation, documenting the archiving, responding to feedback about the documenting and the archiving, documenting the response to the feedback, scheduling meetings to review the archiving and documenting and feedback...This is the way the world ends, not with the bang of Godzilla's giant foot, but the whimper of bored, unproductive people.

That's yet another why you can't make compliance a separate application. It has to be embedded in the tools people use, in ways that are (in order of preference) invisible, helpful, or painless. Otherwise, you might as well slap a giant Portal To Hell logo on your "compliance application," because that's how your users are going to treat it.

Everyone talks about Google's 20% time rule, and most leaders are clear about wanting to create innovation in formal and informal ways, but sometimes things don't always connect. Few have really solved the balance between an organization's concerns (regulations, bad press, protecting the organization) and the innovation and work that is necessary to keep the organization from falling behind.

That's why this post by Don Cohen is a harsh (but honest) lesson that creativity can happen in surprising and unexpected ways and it takes a strong and secure leader to encourage the right projects to move forward.

Thanks to all who participated in the NYC Regional Meet Up! We had representatives from four schools (NYU, Rutgers, Columbia, and St. George's), one commercial vendor (Wimba), and another open source community (JA-SIG). I think that pretty darn good for our first foray.

No one really wanted to take notes, but one of the major presentations dealt with Wimba's new Sakai tool in development that provides integration with their software suite. They already offer integrations with pretty much every other LMS out there, so this is a great step forward for their relationship with the Sakai community. However, I did find out that the great "Voice Email" tool that we loved so much only comes with the Blackboard integration (probably because it piggy-backs of some Bb infrastructure that the other systems don't have). Anyway, it looks great and I can't wait to test it out here.

The second main presentation was about Rutger's implementation of Sakai, and the challenges they faced. Like NYU, they have a large user community and not a lot of staff. Additionally, they have a disparate campus, which had a variety of legacy LMSs. It was very interesting to see what tools and versions they were using and hear about their process of moving all of their WebCT users into Sakai. I know we will probably be looking again at SAMigo and Melete based on what we saw of their implementation.

We also had some interesting discussions which I won't go into here. Suffice it to say, it was an afternoon well spent.

Chris Copolla's blog has a link to an archive of a live discussion with Brad Wheeler on the Chronicle website about the Future of Open Source in Higher Education. My favorite quote is this:

What is the biggest challenge to open source at colleges at this point?

Brad Wheeler: The biggest challenge is not dabbling. Like many things, setting a strategy, executing it well, and extracting value from it is effective. Dabbling in the new (with attendant costs) and still paying for the old just keeps things in a state of flux with unfocused investments and value.