Modularisation in Sakai

##The software of Sakai Sakai is merely a collection of .java (or if you download the binaries, .jar) files that run on your box using the Java Virtual Machine and Apache Tomcat. When properly configured and installed, it provides a Digital Learning Environment similar to Blackboard. A full featured system supporting technology-enabled teaching, learning, research and collaboration for education.

The architecture of Sakai

The Foundation encourages community-building between academic institutions, non-profits and commercial organizations and provides its members and others with an institutional framework within which Sakai projects can flourish. The Foundation also works to promote the wider adoption of community-source and open standards approaches to software solutions within higher education. Foundation staff coordinate software development, quality assurance and distribution activities for the community. Staff members oversee Sakai's intellectual property and track contributor agreements. They also provide technical support for both community members and potential adopters, speak at conferences and other gatherings about Sakai and manage Sakai's own conferences and meetings. The Sakai Foundation is supported by voluntary partner contributions. Sakai Foundations member organizations elect the ten-member Board of Directors, which provide the strategic leadership for the Sakai Foundation.

The leadership of the Sakai community can come from any indvidual. A single person or organization who sees an opportunity may contribute freely without seeking approval from any leadership body.

The Sakai Foundation has a more defined leadership structure in order to ensure that the Foundation's mission to support the community and software is fulfilled. Still, the Board is elected by the members of the community, specifically those institutions that are members of the Sakai Foundation. The Board, in turns, oversees the staffing and financial health of the Foundation. With this structure, the community truly leads the Foundation; the Foundation serves the Sakai community.

The Sakai Partners Program provides the institutional and organizational base for the Sakai Community. Sakai partners are dues-paying members of the Sakai Foundation who provide the intellectual, human and financial capital necessary to support both the foundation and the work of the community. Sakai partners participate in foundation governance; help determine priorities for the community; and work cooperatively in every phase of Sakai's software production process. Membership in the Sakai Partners Program is optional and is open to academic institutions, non-profits and commercial organizations committed to Sakai's community-source vision of open-source software development and distribution.

Contributors

The community seeks to recognize the contributions of volunteers that participate in improving the software and the community. While we highight a few categories of contributors here, there are many, many more individuals around the world working to strengthen Sakai.

*Sakai Fellows share outstanding contributions. *The CLE Technical Coordination Committee ensures a timely, quality release.
*The CLE Maintenance Team addresses issues after release. *The Sakie OAE Steering Group oversees the managed development project.

Contributions to Sakai by multiple developers

The Sakai CLE Tech Committee coordinates with community groups and processes to provide technical direction, advice, and coordination for the Sakai CLE.

The TCC is an open group – all communications are publicly available and anyone is welcome to contribute. The team is largely comprised of experienced community members who bring together diverse perspectives and experiences to guide and support community processes.

The Maintenance Team is a group of community members who work to resolve all issues with the Sakai CLE product. This critical group watches over the product architecture, fixes bugs, applies patches, and helps manage the issue tracker.

Maintenance Team members are often the first to respond to newcomers’ questions on the list, and assist in troubleshooting.

The Maintenance Team is responsible for ensuring the best contributions from the community make it into CLE. Therefore, multiple developers can submit code at the same time and the Maintenance Team will ensure no problems arise.

Sakai development compared to Eclipse

Where Sakai uses JIRA (a proprietary bug tracking product which according to their wikipedia page does not like religious organisations, damn atheists!), Eclipse uses Bugzilla - an open source bug tracking product first released in the previous century. Sakai forces you to register on their website before you can contribute even a bug report, where Eclipse merely asks for a Bugzilla account and allows anyone to contribute patches through Git (and in some cases SVN or CVS, depending on the project). Moreover, Sakai is developed to generate cold hard cash through licenses for big institutions, and Eclipse is free for everyone and their grandma. Contributions to Sakai will probably only accepted if they increase their revenue, where any contribution can make it into Eclipse, as long as the community appreciates it.