Meeting notes available (30 May 2007)

As usual, the meeting notes of our meeting are available on our website. Our last meeting was held on May 30, 2007 in Utrecht. Wytze and Frank provided some details on the way things work within the Sakai community. We had a seperate presentation by Portfolio4U.
Some photos are also available, ofcourse.

Come to the U-Camp!

Just a quick note: come and join the U-Camp! This is the email that Tim Archer from Australia sent out yesterday.
-----Original Message-----
From: Archer, Tim [mailto:TArcher@csu.edu.au]
Sent: Wed 30-5-2007 02:05
To: announcements@collab.sakaiproject.org
Subject: Amsterdam U-Camp
Hi All,
It would be great to see a wide range of people at the U-Camp at Amsterdam, both in terms of skills and geographic representation.
Currently, we have 22 people who have indicated that they are attending but only 6 from outside Northern America, and we would particularly like to see more Europeans, Dutch, South Africans, Australians etc :) so that we can enrich the whole experience!
If you are coming it would be a great help to add your name to the Attending U-Camp Roster page, at
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/OXU
Tim (Chief U-Camp Herder)

Question of the Week

Recently a new initiative was started by Peter Knoop (great idea!) within the Sakai community: you can vote on a question of the week through a poll.
The second poll is titled "Which three areas of Sakai do you think are the most important for your implementation?"
To respond, please access the Polls tool in the "DG: Open Forum" site on Collab. (Note: you need an account on Collab and have to be a member of this site to access the poll. If you need an account, go to Collab's home page and use the New Account tool to self-register for an account. If you are not a member of the site, then use the Membership tool in your MyWorkspace to join the site). Or click here and you will be (re)directed.
The question of the previous poll was: What version of Sakai do plan to be running in production in September 2007?
The results were
Sakai 2.1 (n=0) 0%
Sakai 2.2 (n=0) 0%
Sakai 2.3 (n=26) 24%
Sakai 2.4 (n=34) 76%

Contrib(utions) from The Netherlands

While browsing through Confluence, I came across a (new!) Contrib bool from The Netherlands, Sakai Maps. I am not sure if this is really the first Contrib tool from The Netherlands, but is certainly worth a note here.
The SakaiMaps tool integrates Google Maps into Sakai and allows users to define and browse points of interest (POI) on the map. Each POI has a name, a short description, a type and optionally a url with more information.

Interesting presentations, part 1

As was promised earlier on this weblog we would like to highlight some interesting presentations that will be given during the upcoming Sakai conference in Amsterdam.
In this post two promising presentations that I would like to recommend:
1. An Open-Standards-Based Collaboration and Learning Environment. The Open-CLE project is a collaboration between Rice University and IBM. It aims to develop an open-standards-based, service oriented architecture to help educational institutions loosely tie together open source applications (such as Sakai, Connexions, and D-Space). Angela Rabuch and Mustansar Mehmood will be the presenters in this session. Go check it out on Wednesday, June 13, 14.05 hrs (in room Matterhorn 1). Some more info I found is at IBM and Rice.
2. Why German universities choose Moodle instead of Sakai is a presentation by Andreas Wittke and Rolf Granow from Germany. I myself can imagine some reasons why Moodle is chosen over Sakai. But this is still a presentation worth visiting, since this will also give some insight in how the Dutch Sakai community should be move forward. I will be there on Thursday, June 14, at 14.05 hrs (Zurich 2).

Agenda for next meeting (May 30)

Next week we will see the sixth meeting of the Sakai SIG NL. As always, we will be meeting at the offices of SURFfoundation in Utrecht. Check out the agenda (in Dutch; the meeting language is also Dutch), in case you are interested. If you are planning on attending, it is advisable to send a little note to me, so that I can plan for the appropriate number of 'broodjes'.

Sakai 2.4.0 is available

Today, May 22, the latest version of Sakai has become available. There is lots of new stuff in this release, that has been thoroughly tested by the community, as always.
There is a new and significantly improved Chat tool, but also some completely new tools are now in the core release: Mailtool, Page Order Helper (in Site Info), Polls and User Membership. Furthermore there is new functionality that can be used by means of the Provisional tools, namely Messages, Forums (as two separate tools) and Post'em.
More info is available on the website, as well as detailed release notes on Confluence.

Speakers from The Netherlands

We are only three weeks away from the next (the 7th) Sakai conference, which will be held in Amsterdam. Registration is still possible (only $395 for three days of Sakai!).

In the coming weeks we will present some highlights from the upcoming conference on this weblog. This first post will have some statistics.

First of all the number of sessions: there are 125 sessions in the schedule right now. So there is something for everyone! The number of sessions with (one or more) Dutch speakers is considerable. On my last count there were 3 sessions planned on the first day, June 12. On June 13 there is one session, which is mine. And on the last day, June 14, you can attend 4 Dutch-oriented sessions.