The Sakai Foundation

The Sakai Foundation is a non-profit organization that was set up in late 2005 to encourage community building between academic institutions, nonprofits, and commercial organizations. It coordinates the release cycle and stimulates the ongoing health of the Sakai community by organizing and sponsoring conferences and fellowships. It facilitates the software creation life cycle, from development, through testing and quality assurance, to polishing the user experience.

Recognizing the need for best practice and a methodology for decreasing the learning curve for new tool developers, the Sakai Foundation, with the help of Aaron Zeckoski (http://aaronz-sakai.blogspot.com), set up the Programmer's Café.

Aaron is one example of a highly-motivated community developer, spending much of his free time evolving the product and supporting other members in the community.

Programmer's Café is a set of lectures and hands-on programming labs focused on building new Sakai tools. By the end of the café, the programmers have learned enough to create their own masterpieces. The programmer's café is also about the best practices and how to use the Eclipse programmers' IDE effectively.

Sakai conference organizers traditionally schedule the café for the day before the main conference presentations, and occasionally, a trainer delivers the café as a separate set of planned events. Please see: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/BOOT/Programmer%27s+Cafe for more details.

You can find more information on the Sakai Foundation's website (http://sakaiproject.org), as shown in the following screenshot. Notice the links to documentation and downloads. Foundation members work to ensure that the information online is as up-to-date as possible.

The development of the Sakai CLE has been date-driven, with aggressive milestones and a transparent requirements process. The implication is that, by the time you read this chapter, the next version of Sakai will be out. There will be more tools for users to choose from, many minor enhancements and performance improvements, numerous bugs spotted and removed, and many honest discussions at the local and international conferences, especially in the mailing lists.