Agenda for next meeting (July 4)

The last meeting of the Sakai Special Interest Group The Netherlands of the current academic year is scheduled for July 4 (next Wednesday). Main agenda item is the evaluation of the University of Twente of Sakai. The complete agenda of this meeting is available for you to read (in Dutch).
In case you are planning to attend, a little note by email would be appreciated.

Executive dinner - part 2

This is a second post on the executive dinner last week in Amsterdam. There are three more things that are worth mentioning here and are fit for publication. Some other things are also really worth mentioning, but are not fit for publication yet. Please keep coming back and you might find out!
First of all there was a quite interesting point that was made by John Norman, the chair of the Sakai Board of Directors. He told us that for them, at the University of Cambridge, one of the big benefits of joining Sakai is what he calls 'staff development'. Because you are engaged in a worldwide, very fast-moving community, your staff gets much more opportunities to develop themselves. And you also can attract more easily the people that you need, because of the Sakai work that you need to do. This is really true for Cambridge. They have indeed attracted at least two sofware engineers from outside the UK to work for them.
Another interesting discussion we had was about software licensing. Well, actually it was about freedom of choice ofcourse! Most (commercial) software licencing schemes are based on 'seats' or 'users' or 'accounts', or maybe 'campus' or 'location'. This is very confining to the way we operate as educational institutions. This will simply not hold true in our sector. Think about all the collaboration we do, within our country, or even within the EU. Or what about the guest lecturers that we invite to our campuses. Officially they most likely are not allowed to use your VLE. There was given an example of a portofolio system in the UK that caused these kind of headaches to the ones involved. Because of the Educational Community License of Sakai, I can give away as many accounts and access rights to our Sakai system as needed. And we have done that already, and we will. There is one account underway right now!
One other interesting aspect of Sakai that we discussed is that a 'surprising' amount of Sakai installations are not physically based at a educational institution. Someone said that maybe about 50% of Sakai use is through intermediaries. So, in case you feel that your institution is not capable of hosting and servicing Sakai (which is indeed not that easy), you can rely on a service provider. This is true in the US, but also in The Netherlands. Go talk to Stoas, Portfolio4u, A New Spring, Omix or Edia! They will be more than happy to assist you. And if you want more 'independent' advice, please feel free to contact me.

Executive dinner - part 1

Wednesday, June 13, was the 2nd day of the latest Sakai conference. It was a busy day, as I mentioned earlier. I had been looking forward to this day for quite some time. Mainly because Frank Benneker and myself organized a dinner meeting on behalf of SURFfoundation between the Sakai Board and representatives of SURFfoundation, plus executives from Higher Education instituions in The Netherlands. The exchange of ideas during the meeting was very open and honest. Charles Severance had prepared a very thorough, but concise, walkthrough of what Sakai is, why Sakai exists, and who is part of it. This laid the foundation for some thorough discussions that we had.
Let me just give some highlights:

1. The relation with Oracle, more specifically regarding Peoplesoft Campus Solutions, was asked for. Apparantly this good news had not travelled in the right directions: that the integrations between Campus Solutions and Sakai is being worked on quite extensively and that some results should be expected by the end of the year. The University of Amsterdam is closely involved in this effort.
   
2. Security and reliability of Sakai. I could say the same thing ('news has not travelled yet'). Twofold answer: there is very effective security procedure in place, headed by Anthony Whyte, but secondly there has not been any major breakdown of a Sakai installation due to hackers and/or very clever students. In a sense this was the question if open source software is enterprise ready, scalable and secure. We answered this very effectively, I think.

Some more highlights in a later post....

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.

Next meeting: April 4

As you know the conference committee is doing a great job in selecting and reviewing the proposals for the Amsterdam conference. The 'results' will be available shortly.
In the meantime I have everything set up for our 5th meeting of the Sakai SIG NL. It will be held in Utrecht, as usual, at the SURF offices. A detailed agenda (in Dutch) is available. If you haven't received an email regarding this meeting, but are planning to attend, please let me know (so that I can count you in for the lunch!).

Starting up

I am just starting up my work stuff, as I returned from a vacation in Sri Lanka.
Three things to get this weblog started again:
1/ The meeting notes of our 31 Jan meeting are already available. We had a great attendance and some interesting news that was shared. Not everything is in the meeting notes... so, please be present next time (which is on Apr 4, in Utrecht, as always).
2/ The Sakai Foundation seeks to recruit a UX (User eXperience) Lead, which is great news! Everything can contribute money to make this happen.
3/ On March 27, the Innovatium conference will take place in Amsterdam. We will be present.

Agenda for Jan 31, 2007

For all those that speak Dutch, please read our agenda for our next meeting. The meeting will take place in Utrecht, at the SURF offices.
I am expecting around 20 people (that is at least what SURF is catering for regarding lunch). I you are planning on attending our meeting, please let me know *by sending an email to me or * by placing a comment on this post.

High level exposure for Sakai

This post deals with some specifics of the way we work together within The Netherlands regarding the use of ICT in Higher Education (HE). This might be interesting for foreign readers, but it might be more interesting for my Dutch readers, I guess.
Yesterday I was invited to do a short presentation for SURF. What is SURF, you might ask? Here are some quotes from their website, that say it better than I could: "SURF is the collaborative organisation of and for the institutes for higher education in the Netherlands. (..) The statutory organs of the SURF Foundation are the General Board, the Executive Board and the Scientific Technical Council. The administrative representation is implemented within the three SURF platforms: Research, Education and Organisation."
So, SURF is in fact the (only!) national organisation where every and all HE institutions work together on the improvement of the use of ICT within our institutions. SURF is also facilitating this weblog, some of my time that I am spending on Sakai, and the meetings that we regularly have in The Netherlands with all those that are interested in Sakai.
I was invited for the quarterly meeting of the Board of the ICT and Organisation Platform on January 10, 2007. Members of this board are executives from 8 different HE institutions within The Netherlands.
I presented (presentation in Dutch), within a short timeframe, what Sakai is, who is involved within The Netherlands, what our vision is etc. I think I did a good job of informing the Board and thereby gave some more exposure for Sakai on the executive level within HE in The Netherlands. Questions that got asked where mainly on the level of "does the community really work?" or "who is actually using Sakai right now?". More specifically some of the board members were quite interested in the fact that OSP is used quite widely already within secondary vocational education in our country. The board was very pleased with the presentation and wished us luck for the future.
Oh, and there is one more thing that came up during our short discussion: Sharepoint. This is our main "competitor" within the Netherlands. And Sharepoint has a distinct advantage, that was laid out nicely in the discussion: the user interface is so familiar....people are so used to all this stuff from Microsoft. So, once again, at least for me, one more reason why the Sakai User Experience should be high(er?) on our agenda.
What do you think?

We had a great meeting today!

Today we had our 3rd face-to-face meeting of the Sakai Special Interest Group The Netherlands (Sakai SIG NL). We had quite a bunch of new people at the table, which is great. We even had some Belgian collegues from Gent. There were some great stories and experiences that were shared. I was pleasantly surprised by the great number of institutions that are working with OSP, mainly due to the efforts of Portfolio4U.
I have tried to capture most of the meeting in the notes. Check the website for all the nitty gritty details. I am awaiting eagerly the stuff that Jaeques and Ferry shared with us :-)
For (y)our convenience here are some URL's that were mentioned today:

1. Translation of Sakai into Dutch: http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/7W4
2. Overview of all QA servers to be found on http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/ZT8
3. Styleguide for the Dutch translation: http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/8G4
4. Our wiki: http://www.sakai-pilot.utwente.nl/sakaiwiki/
5. Video Alfa College (featuring Jim Doherty): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3462508180886557891

See you all next time, on Jan 31, 2007!

Sakai SIG NL: Agenda for 22 november 2006

{Dutch} Iedereen is welkom op 22 november 2006 in Utrecht. Agenda voor 22 november 2006: "De agenda voor onze derde bijeenkomst is bekend. Zie het attachment. We hebben een aantal nieuwe gezichten aan tafel en er is een interessante bijdrage van Walter Brand (Memotrainer)."

Sakai Foundation present at Dutch ELO Conference

The Dutch conference "Over de grenzen van de ELO II" (Beyond the boundaries of the electronic learning environment), held on Sept. 28th-29th, included two interesting contributions made by Chuck Severance, Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation. See http://stanleyportier.blogspot.com for a reflection of the first conference day.

Meeting notes available

Yesterday we had our second official meeting of the Sakai SIG NL. I was pleasantly surprised to see some new faces at the table (well actually this is what I am aiming at ofcourse!). We heard some great stories about Sakai. I have tried to capture anything of interest in the meeting notes (that are in English, for our non-Dutch speaking friends around the world).
Sakai SIG NL: Verslag 13 sep (editie 2): "Op 13 september was de tweede officiële bijeenkomst van de Sakai Special Interest Group NL. Het was een interessante bijeenkomst met nieuwe en bekende gezichten.
Het verslag is te vinden in de bijlage. Volgende bijeenkomst is gepland op 22 november 2006. Iedereen met interesse in Sakai is van harte welkom."