Four new Directors for the Apereo Foundation

via Ian Dolphin , Executive Director, Apereo Foundation:

I am pleased to announce that the following candidates have been elected to the Board of Directors of the Apereo Foundation, subject to ratification by a meeting of the membership:

Alain Mayeur, President, ESUP­‐Portail Consortium, IT Director, University of Valenciennes (France)

David Kahle, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, Tufts University (USA)

Dr. Douglas Johnson, Assistant Director for Learning Services, University of Florida (USA)

Professor Shoji Kajita, IT Planning Office / Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies. Kyoto University (Japan)

Sincere thanks to all the candidates willing to serve, and congratulations to those who were elected.

And as a personal note from me, congratulations and I look forward to working with you on the Board!

A new beginning

Yesterday morning I tendered my resignation from my position as Senior Developer/Java Team Leader at ANU.

As I look back on my time here, I’m proud of my accomplishments working with Sakai, uPortal , DSpace and CAS, rolling out all four applications the the entire university, contributing countless lines of code to these open source projects, and presenting to both the ANU and the international community wherever possible. I’ve had a tremendous experience and have met some amazing people along the way.

I’m now looking forward to my new career as a Senior Analyst at Fivium, a dynamic, award winning IT company working with the UK and Australian governments and the private sector, developing innovative solutions on a major scale. It’s going to be fast paced and I’m really excited about the new challenge!

Oh, and Sakaigers, fear not: I will still remain as active as ever in the Apereo community

University of Amsterdam and Edia launch MOOC platform based on Sakai

MOOC - ‘Massively Open Online Course’: a type of online course aimed at large-scale participation and open access via the web. MOOCs are a recent development in the area of distance education, and a progression of the kind of open education ideals suggested by open educational resources. (source: Wikipedia)

The Central Computing Services department of the University of Amsterdam
developed in close co-operation with Edia (Sakai partner) a new MOOC
platform based on Sakai CLE 2.9. This platform will be used to launch the
Universities first MOOC, “Introduction to Communication Science”. A
dedicated Course-catalog and self-enrollment tool have been developed for
this platform.

The online course entitled “Introduction to Communication Science” is an
initiative of the College of Communication and the Graduate School of
Communication Science. In the QS World University Rankings 2012, the
Communication Science programme at the UvA was assessed as the best in
Europe.

The University of Amsterdam is developing various initiatives in the field
of ICT in education. More and more lectures can be viewed online via live
stream or afterwards. Developing and experimenting with MOOCs corresponds
with the University’s desire to make knowledge widely available and show
the appeal of academic study.

Interested parties can enrol now in the “Introduction to Communication
Science” study course via http://mooc.uva.nl

External Calendaring Service for Sakai

Over the past few months I’ve been working on and off on a project to make working with iCal files within Sakai really easy - I call it the External Calendaring Service. I am pleased to announce that this is now available for your delicious consumption.

It leverages iCal4J and allows you to turn Sakai CalendarEvents into iCal files. You can aggregate a number of events together to create one calendar and then attach it to an email, then update events, delete events, add and remove participants etc. This is really useful when tools want to send out notices about events, so an obvious integration for this is the Signup tool, which fully integrates with the service.

Check out the Javadocs for the complete info:

http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/external-calendaring-service/1.0.5/apidocs/org/sakaiproject/calendaring/api/ExternalCalendaringService.html

The service is available in source code via the Sakai SVN repo, but to integrate with your project just add the following dependency to your POM and you are done:

 <dependency>
     <groupId>org.sakaiproject.calendaring</groupId>
     <artifactId>external-calendaring-service-api</artifactId>
     <version>1.0.5</version>
 </dependency>

Source: https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/external-calendaring-service/

Feedback or suggestions for features warmly welcomed.

Reduce your Sakai CLE startup time

There is a current discussion on the sakai-dev list about the recent switch to Tomcat 7 and some new features in Tomcat that meant startup times took a bit longer than they used to.

http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai-dev/2012-November/thread.html#19508

As it turns out there is a new feature in Tomcat 7 that scans jar files for various Servlet 3 features. However the CLE code doesn’t use any Servlet 3 features yet.

So we can just disable the scanning and cut our startup times by a fair amount.  On my local full trunk deployment I was able to reduce my startup from 175 seconds down to 89 seconds.

To do this, in catalina.properties, set:

org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.jarsToSkip=*.jar

So far, all CLE tools in 2.10 appear fully functional. If you try this and experience issues, please let me know in the comments, or post on list.

Jasig-Sakai consolidation vote passes

The recent Jasig-Sakai consolidation vote by the respective Foundation and community members has passed, meaning that we can now push forward with the last remaining steps towards forming the Apereo Foundation.

The results of the vote are:

Sakai
58 Members voted for the merger, 3 voted against, and 3 abstained. 13 Members did not register a vote.

Jasig
40 Members voted for the merger, 1 voted against, and 1 abstained. 5 Members did not register a vote.

On behalf of the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors and the Jasig-Sakai Working Group, thanks to everyone who took the time to vote in this historical event in our respective communities.

Why I support the Jasig-Sakai consolidation

In a few days, both the Sakai and Jasig communities will be voting to consolidate into one organisation, the Apereo Foundation. This is the culmination of over a years worth of effort from many people from both communities and it is a very exciting time to be part of open source communities such as Sakai and Jasig.

If you are not familiar with what the vote is all about, take a look at the documents posted on http://www.apereo.org

I’d like to share my thoughts on why I support the Jasig Sakai consolidation plan, since I am involved in projects from both communities, to hopefully offer some insight into how each community will benefit from the consolidation.

Both communities do certain things really well, but there are areas where the expertise from the other group could be brought to bear. For example, current Jasig projects would benefit greatly from the comprehensive QA and accessibility working groups within the Sakai community, and current/future Sakai projects would benefit greatly from the detailed Jasig incubation process and speedy release cycles that are applied to Jasig projects.

In addition, uPortal has a mature mobile project called uMobile. Sakai CLE has a rather basic mobile web view only, but is gearing up for web service support to enable web applications. I see some great collaborations and integrations happening in this space as we move forward.

As for financial savings, there will be considerable savings as the need for two Executive Directors is reduced to one. We can also share infrastructure and reduce the overhead for running it, further reducing the costs and freeing up the time of developers who look after the hardware, to get back into the code where they are needed the most.

There are many other financial benefits to be had, including savings on conferences, collaboration tools, communication services and project facilitation. In the longer term we can achieve considerable economies of scale as we de-duplicate each other.

To the outside world, the Apereo Foundation will hopefully appear as a more attractive and robust option for serving more of an institution’s needs. There is a big push (at least in Australia) to reduce the number of vendors that serve institutions and establish relationships with just a few to provide a larger number of services. Apereo will be in this space. We won’t just offer an LMS/CLE anymore, we can now also offer an enterprise portal, single sign on, a calendaring system, institutional mobile apps, and much more. As institutions see possible alignments, more opportunities for shared development becomes possible.

To paraphrase Maggie Lynch, the previous Chair of the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors, I truly believe that if we don’t find ways to share resources, leverage talent across each of the projects and invest in a larger vision for open source software that serves more of an institution’s needs, then we will ultimately fail. I believe we are stronger together, which is why I support the consolidation plan. What you believe should determine your vote.

Voting

As for voting, you have two options. Join into a teleconference meeting (details below) and vote ‘in person’ or fill out a proxy voting form and email it – the proxy form is the preferred option just in case of technical difficulties or if you can’t make the meeting on the day, for some reason. On that form you will be nominating the current Sakai Foundation Board Chair, David Ackerman from NYU, to record your vote. You can indicate how you want David to vote for you. It’s as simple as that. The form is due on the 29th October though, which is really close, so please get your forms in.

Note that if you don’t vote at all, or if you abstain, your vote will be counted as a no, so please vote!

Also, if you are not the institutional representative who will be voting, but you are active in the community and have an opinion on the consolidation, lobby your representative and make sure they vote.

Some key dates and times:

29th October 2012

• Proxy voting form to david@nyu.edu, or
• RSVP for the teleconference to iandolphin@sakaifoundation.org

1st November, 2012 at 5 p.m. GMT (1 p.m. EST/New York)

• Teleconference where you can vote in person. You need to RSVP (see above) to get the  connection details.

2nd November, 2012 at 1 a.m. GMT (12 p.m. Sydney, Australia, 10 a.m. Tokyo, Japan)

• If needed, a continuation of the above teleconference to accommodate members in these timezones.

 

Planning for Sakai 2.10 and beyond

I believe it is time for the Sakai community to embark on a proper planning and management process for the Sakai CLE, to take us well into the future. Not one that is based on existing Jira’s that are left hanging, not one that is based on just fixing a bunch of bugs and calling that a release, but one that completely realigns the focus of the CLE and brings the product back into the spotlight within the LMS market.

The Sakai Technical Coordination Committee (TCC) was formed in 2010 because there was no suitable technical or functional leadership for Sakai. We took control of the technical aspects, and have so far done an excellent job in getting bugs fixed, features implemented and releases cut.

However, I believe that at this point in time, what the CLE needs is to regroup and refocus on what it is what we want to achieve. Focus groups, steering committees, surveys, evangelists and visionaries, connecting with the people that have the skills, that make the decisions and that have the funding. In my personal opinion, we lack direction, the product is becoming stale and we are at risk of institutions and organisations leaving the community altogether.

As Michael Feldstein writes, the Sakai project is at a critical inflection point. We need to seize the opportunity to re-evaluate the LMS/CLE market and see what it is that teachers and students want from an environment, and how we can deliver that.

None of this will be easy. We don’t have dedicated funding to hire developers, nor the group of people as I described above, to discuss where the product needs to go. The community source model works, previous years of the Sakai project has proven that, but it falls down when the product gets stale and momentum is lost. It cannot always be left to volunteers to pick up the pieces.

What we do have though, is a solid product that is in use by millions of people every day and a thriving community of implementing institutions and commercial partners, all of who want the best for their students and clients. This is the perfect time to reflect on our product and start re-imagining what needs to be done.

Jasig-Sakai Joint Unconference – Save the date!

Who. What. Where.

What

The Sixth Annual Jasig (First Joint Sakai) Unconference on the campus of Arizona State University/Polytechnic, Mesa, AZ

Dates

January 14-16, 2013 2 1/2 days of sessions; January 16-17, 2013 1 1/2 days of developer-implementer gathering

Place

Start Up Lab at ASU/Poly http://campus.asu.edu/polytechnic

Registration

TBD

Accommodation

DoubleTree Gilbert is offering a discounted rate of $129.00 per night, including wireless. Registration will be by individuals, using group code JASIG. Check back for more information. January 2013 Unconference Hotel

Meals

Coffee Breaks, Lunch Mon-Tues-Wed provided.

Travel Information

Campus is approximately 30 minutes from Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport

What’s an Unconference?

“An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of organizers, in advance.”
-Wikipedia

Jasig and Sakai have always been about people coming together to share and learn in an open environment, and this is what an “unconference” is all about. The unconference format fits very well with our community values and goals. This January event is our sixth Unconference and will provide both spontaneous and planned opportunities to collaborate on all Jasig and Sakai community initiatives as well as initiatives from other community open source communities as well. Mark your calendar, make plans to join us and register as soon as registration opens up!

What are we going to do?!

The Jasig-Sakai UnConference consists of multiple face to face sessions occurring throughout the day. Some sessions may have more formal presentations, most sessions involve heavy interaction with the audience as a whole. The list of topics, presenters and facilitators is very dynamic and the final schedule will be determined in real-time, interactively with the attendees. Topics will likely include:

• Project updates on CAS, uPortal, Bedework, uMobile, Grouper, Student Success Plan, Sakai CLE/OAE
• Sessions on identity management, targeting mobile devices, development tools and techniques
• Discussions around the Jasig/Sakai merger, Openness, adopting Open Source

OK, I’m Interested! What do I do next?

Mark the date in your calendar and stay tuned for more information.

Contact Patty Gertz (ed@jasig.org) if you would like to be on the planning committee.

See you at the Unconference!

Java industry review 2012

This is a pretty interesting survey of the Java industry in 2012 from over 1100 respondents, undertaken by Zeroturnaround, well known for giving us JRebel.

You need to signup to read it, though I’ve posted a summary below¹.

http://zeroturnaround.com/labs/developer-productivity-report-2012-java-tools-tech-devs-and-data/

Key stats

• Eclipse, Maven and Subversion are the de facto standard in the Java world, used by over 2/3 of respondents.
• Jenkins, Tomcat Spring, Hibernate used by 1.2 of respondents, also de facto standard kit.
• Java 6 adopted by over 88% of respondents.
• Java 7 at 23% uptake.
• Java 1.4 dropped to 6%. Almost phased out.
• Groovy is pretty popular as a Java based scripting language.
• 67% of developers use Maven, 48% use Ant.
• 59% of developers use Tomcat.
• Web frameworks are pretty widespread, Spring MVC the winner at 30%. JSF just behind it, my favourite Wicket at 7%, along with quite a few others.
• App frameworks have Hibernate and Spring at 50% each. A few other frameworks with minor market share.
• JPA most popular standard for Java EE, EJB 3.0 at  23%, OSGi at 8%.
• Jenkins has 49% of the share for continuous integration servers
• Code quality tools have PMD, check style and find bugs around the 20-30% mark each.
• Subversion used by 66% of developers, Git climbs to 33%.

How do developers spend their time?

• Finding #1: Devs spend less time writing code than you might think. The median is 15 hours, programmers spend about 3 hours each work day writing code.
• Finding #2: Devs spend more time on non-development activities than you might think. For each coding hour, devs spend nearly 30min in meetings, reporting, writing emails and dealing with timesheets (7 hours to 15 hours).
• Finding #3: Devs spend more time fighting fires than building solutions.

Developer efficiency

“What aspects of developer life makes you more/less efficient?”

• Too much multi-tasking – 53%
• Boring tasks? – 39%
• Bad management – 30%
• Buggy software – 26%
• Lack of motivation – 26%

“The majority of respondents felt that Too Much Multitasking was the primary reason for not getting work done. Over 1/3 of devs also mentioned that Boring Tasks where responsible for under-efficiency in the cubicle.

This begs the question whether or not it is better to get “boring” tasks over and finished as quickly as possible, but we all understand how feeling uninspired to attack your work with enthusiasm will lead to procrastination.

It is fair to conclude that Boring tasks, Bad management and Lack of motivation are indicative of a sizable gap in communication between management and development teams, or, more interestingly, a lack of self-management for organizing one’s time, one’s mind and one’s life.”

What keeps developers up at night?

• Making deadlines – 25.00%
• Application performance issues – 24.10%
• Is my code good enough? – 23.70%
• What new stuff do I need to learn? – 23.50%
• Did I do X in the best way? – 22.50%

[1] If you feel that posting this summary violates your copyright, get in touch.