Downes on Sakai
Created by Catherine Howell (University of Cambridge) on February 02, 2006
The Sakai Project is a major open-source development, which aims to produce a robust, scalable collaborative learning environment for higher education.
An article by Stephen Downes in the latest issue of Innovate! provides a good overview of the Sakai project website and helpfully steers newcomers towards the best content and resources.
This is one of those Really Useful articles that the open-source community needs to do more - a lot more - of. Downes is right: the Sakai site is confusing to navigate and, in many sections, is dominated by technical language. This can be highly off-putting to non-developer stakeholders who choose to visit.
And this is precisely where many open source projects fall down: in terms of communications and outreach towards those who are located "outside" the developer community. The problem is that an open-source project website is (normally) both the public and the private face of the community. The website has to serve a dual purpose, looking "outward" towards casual visitors and end users, and "inward" towards its own members. You can't solve this problem by shutting the developers' mud-wrestling, sorry, complex and interesting discussions, off into password-protected areas of the site; because that usually means that the information left within the "visitor/user" sections of the site is far too thin to be useful.
The Sakai Project is both a piece (or suite) of software, and a community of developers, partners, and institutional stakeholders, and its site has to be a working site where technical conversations can take place. But that shouldn't preclude clear navigation and structuring of information. You have to make it easy for people, and the best way to do that is to show them what you have to offer.
I still think the Flickr website has the best example of this: a completely new concept and tool, introduced in a clear and engaging way. The open-source community shouldn't be too snobbish to learn from the most successful user-focused products and tools.
An article by Stephen Downes in the latest issue of Innovate! provides a good overview of the Sakai project website and helpfully steers newcomers towards the best content and resources.
This is one of those Really Useful articles that the open-source community needs to do more - a lot more - of. Downes is right: the Sakai site is confusing to navigate and, in many sections, is dominated by technical language. This can be highly off-putting to non-developer stakeholders who choose to visit.
And this is precisely where many open source projects fall down: in terms of communications and outreach towards those who are located "outside" the developer community. The problem is that an open-source project website is (normally) both the public and the private face of the community. The website has to serve a dual purpose, looking "outward" towards casual visitors and end users, and "inward" towards its own members. You can't solve this problem by shutting the developers' mud-wrestling, sorry, complex and interesting discussions, off into password-protected areas of the site; because that usually means that the information left within the "visitor/user" sections of the site is far too thin to be useful.
The Sakai Project is both a piece (or suite) of software, and a community of developers, partners, and institutional stakeholders, and its site has to be a working site where technical conversations can take place. But that shouldn't preclude clear navigation and structuring of information. You have to make it easy for people, and the best way to do that is to show them what you have to offer.
I still think the Flickr website has the best example of this: a completely new concept and tool, introduced in a clear and engaging way. The open-source community shouldn't be too snobbish to learn from the most successful user-focused products and tools.
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