| ANN ARBOR, MI -- 17 October 2005 The Sakai Project today announces the creation of the Sakai Foundation to provide a permanent home for the growing Sakai Community. As a non-profit, membership corporation the Sakai Foundation will provide Sakai developers, adopters, and users a place to coordinate their efforts.
"We've been planning for the foundation all year," notes Joseph Hardin, who chairs the Sakai Project Board. "The 80+ Sakai Educational Partners and 12 Commercial Affiliates have participated in developing the governance plans for our software community via meetings, videoconferences, and online voting." The Foundation will oversee the Sakai Partners program and relationships with companies. All the founding institutions, the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, and Stanford along with board members from Foothill College, UC-Berkeley, University of Delaware, U. of Hull (UK), and U. of Toronto strongly support the creation of the Sakai Foundation. "The community response has been universally positive," Hardin said.
The foundation marks an important step in the rapid rise of the Sakai Project (see sakaiproject.org). In less than two years, the project has attracted worldwide interest, managed enterprise-scale deployments, and developed a sustainability path with financial support into the future.
"Colleges and universities around the world are watching carefully as Sakai has transitioned from a grant project to a community-based foundation. With it go our collective hopes for a creative future. This is company that's good to be among," Phil Long, Senior Strategist for the Academic Computing Enterprise at MIT, said.
The launch of the Sakai Foundation builds on the highly successful Apache Software Foundation model. The Sakai software remains open for anyone to use, modify, and distribute without any obligation to join as a Sakai Partner. Those who wish to can become Sakai Partners and participate in the governance of the foundation and its operations by contributing $10,000 per year ($5,000 for smaller colleges). "This modest cash flow into the foundation from members provides a real sustainability path for coordination and leverage of the Sakai Community work," Hardin noted.
The Sakai Project, announced in January 2004, promised to develop an open source Collaboration and Learning Environment for the needs of higher education. The Sakai Software is already deployed as the primary teaching and learning system at the University of Michigan with over 35,000 users. It is in a full parallel year at Indiana with deployment to 90,000. Major pilot projects and rollouts are underway at Stanford, UC-Berkeley, MIT, Rutgers, Yale, UC-Merced, UNISA (University of South Africa), Universitat de Lleida (Spain), Roskilde Universitetscenter (Denmark), Universidade Fernando Pessoa (Portugal), and others (see Sakai Pilot Projects at SakaiProject.org).
The Foundation will manage a small staff to coordinate evolution of the Sakai software, provide advanced developer support for members, conduct quality assurance work on Sakai releases, track contributor agreements and manage the Sakai IP, and manage conferences and meetings for the Sakai Community. Much of the innovation and tool development will continue to be done where it is best understood -- among the distributed community of Sakai users and developers.
"The Sakai Foundation creates a shared place that is wholly of, by, and
for the educational and research community to coordinate a healthy ecosystem among all who wish to participate," Brad Wheeler, Indiana University and Sakai Board member, said. "The foundation provides all participants open licensing, leveraged work, walk away rights, no inhibiting NDA's or discriminatory pricing, and a place to shape our software destiny together."
The establishment of the Sakai Foundation is a key part of opening up the Sakai Project from the original work supported by the Mellon and Hewlett grants and founding institutions to a global open source Collaboration and Learning Environment community, including work in the eSciences and digital libraries.
"Here at Cambridge we warmly welcome the incorporation of the Sakai Foundation as a safe harbour for the Sakai code and a new focus for the growing community that is deploying and developing the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment," said John Norman of Cambridge University.
"Already Sakai is allowing several inter-institution distributed research groups to innovate in the way they carry out their research and we are planning to promote Sakai as offering valuable tools to support every individual on our campus in addition to its groups and course management support," Norman added.
"The recent news in the learning management enterprise business underscores the wisdom higher education has exhibited in placing value and trust in the 'commons', and in particular in the commons tended by the new Sakai Foundation," Phil Long said.
"The formation of the Sakai Foundation is a momentous event that reaffirms the collective commitment of higher education to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Sakai project and the community that has developed around it. I am filled with great pride for what we have accomplished in the last 18 months. It marks the beginning of greater innovation and collaboration - the real value of open source," said Vivian Sinou, Dean, Distance & Mediated Learning, Foothill College, and Sakai Board Member.
Open source software thus has a new foundation - the Sakai Foundation - leveraging the talent of institutions and individuals worldwide joining to build a common, open future.
Contact information:
Mary Miles
mmiles@umich.edu
734-764-3614
Margaret Wagner
mwagner@umich.edu
734-764-3199
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