Sakai: Technology Transformation in an Open Source Community

From its origins in 2003 as a grant funded project, Sakai has become a successful open source community, with over three hundred adoptions worldwide, and a growing ecosystem of community and commercial support. Over the same period, economic, policy and technology landscape changes, have dramatically modified the context against which an open source community rooted in Higher Education operates. The Sakai community is dealing with these challenges of this changed context on multiple levels: The development of an innovative software environment, the Sakai Open Academic Environment, embodying an application of the experience of social networking to the online support of academic practice, and applying lessons of web-scale software development to that environment. Driven by community requirements, the project is providing a bridging layer from the established Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment to the Open Academic Environment, thus allowing institutions to plan environmental transitions, or extend institutional capacity in support of online learning into social space. The transformation of the Sakai Foundation, which is the organisational locus of Sakai community organisation, to sustainably support multiple software projects. This is taking place both internally, and by building new relationships with other open source communities.