Sakai SIG NL - number 1

{july 26: updated with URL's pointing to http://elearning.surf.nl/sakai}
I won't repeat what Willem van Valkenburg has written already about the first meeting of the Sakai Special Interest Group The Netherlands (Sakai SIG NL). That would be a waste of time. But this is my summary of our first SIG meeting. I think we heard a good mix of enthousiastic and more realistic stories.
Saxion Hogescholen (Willem Smith and Hans de Vries) had a great presentation on student engagement with Sakai in one of their schools (the school for computer science).
Longtime Sakai partner University of Amsterdam (Frank Benneker) gave us a useful impression of different ways of involvement that are possible within the community. They are doing a lot of great work in the area of automatic code review.
My own collegue Stanley Portier presented the next steps for the University of Twente, which are definitely exciting since we are going into the pilotphase of our project real soon with Sakai 2.2.
Erasmus gave us an insight in some hindrances that they are having right now to get properly started with Sakai. So, their focus is now to get started in 2007.
And Stoas, together with Hotelschool The Hague, are also eagerly awaiting Sakai 2.2 to go ahead with some pilots.
Last, but not least, Leidse OnderwijsInstellingen (LOI), told us why they are interested in Sakai and OSP. And LOI is quite special, since they are what you could say a private school.
For now we have reached our first goal, which was to inform each other of our developments regarding Sakai. It also liked the fact that some other institutions were also present (TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, Universiteit Utrecht). And the Vrije Universiteit couldn't attend, but were interested to get notified of what happened.
What I will do as a next step is to work out a more detailed projectplan of what our SIG is about and where we can collaborate more closely together. We touched on some of these issues already last Wednesday, but that was only superficial as we were running out of time. This projectplan will be discussed with the SIG on our next meeting on September 13. That will be right after the first European Sakai Day in Lubeck, Germany.
In the coming weeks I will be working on a more permanent solution for our (internal and external) communications on the web. I am hoping (and striving) for http://elearning.surf.nl/sakai as well as http://www.surf.nl/sakai. How do you like that?
The presentations are here: http://elearning.surf.nl/sakai_en/agenda/3568.
Update: Keith Russel has also written about our first meeting.
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