If you haven’t heard, there has been some rebranding effort in the Sakai community recently. The project formerly known as “Sakai 3″ has been dubbed the Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE). The reaction has been varied; some wonder why a name change at all, some don’t especially care for the choice, some wonder why it wasn’t chosen differently…
I’m writing this post to give my perspective of why this is a healthy community move, even if the exact name “OAE” doesn’t stick.
This is just one more recognition that we’re talking about a new and different product. “3″ doesn’t work very well as a product identifier, amongst ourselves, or to the broader world. This is an important distinction between Sakai (the community/brand/make) and Sakai (the software/product/model).
As the project portfolio for the Sakai community expands, we need real names for the projects. This looks to become more natural if we draw closer to our Jasig friends, who already have a number of named projects. (As a side note, be ready to have discussions on your campus and at conferences of how a Collaboration and Learning Environment [CLE] is different from the OAE.)
So, my takeaway, whether you like the name Open Academic Environment or not, is that this is an important step on the maturity path for our community. -NB
P.S. Although OAE doesn’t roll off my tongue very well, I’m glad to be done with this dance: well, take the S off, and change it to a three. Yeah, it’s a nerdy thing. No, I didn’t pick it. They usually pronounce it… Explaining it always felt like watching awful karaoke.
6 comments ↓
I don’t like the new name.
I think one of the major selling points of Sakai 3 was that it would be a more integrated piece of software; everyone hoped it would leave behind the separate components (tools) model and have better, tighter integration across features.
I think changing the name to Open Academic Environment hints that Sakai 3 is, yet again, a framework that is going to leave something to be desired as far as consistency of UI, integration of different components, and all of the other arguments for starting a Sakai 3 project.
At this point, if the Sakai 2.x tools are going to run in OAE, and they are both frameworks, 3akai might as well be merged into the 2.x line as an upgrade or side-grade.
The hardest part of a project like Sakai 3 is getting folks out there to actually use it in earnest, and if the focus and/or implications of intent keep drifting, I think it will make adoption even more impossible. (Yes, I know folks are ‘using it now,’ but I’d argue that really a half truth… they are only using specific features, using unreleased non-F/OSS code, and it’s augmenting some other system.)
I like the request for feedback though. I’ve been wondering if we’d see that, soon.
I think there’s another subtlety to the discussion. Is it really a new name or a new product category? It would be a fair criticism to say that it’s problematic to try to do both at once, which is what Sakai is effectively doing with this name/category.
I think I value the label more as a product category than a product name. That is, I value it as a description of what we’re trying to build, not what I want to call it.
Along those lines, I can’t agree with the feeling that it represents product drift. Quite the contrary, it seems to me a step toward being clearer and drawing lines around what it is and isn’t.
This is helpful, Clay. I, too, think that it’s more of a descriptive label than a product name. This can be compared to Collaborative Learning Environment.
In effect, we’ve defined two labels for what we build, and distribute one of each, without further naming. I don’t particularly find this troublesome.
An additional name may provide some further identity, but I see getting away from “three” as the word to capture the category, product, project, and technology as an important step.
This isn’t a huge deal to me, as it is just a name. But as one of those that’s publicly complained about the name, there are really four things that bother me about it. First, it’s a vague, cold, phrase that means little, and doesn’t adequately reflect the vision behind the project. Second, the distinction between OAE and CLE is entirely unclear (is the intention really to signal that an OLE is not also a CLE? what’s the difference?). Third, the name change itself is confusing (why change now? is it a code name, or the actual product name?). Finally, I don’t see how the name was a product of the “community.” Seems to me the community found out about it after the fact.
This is a great conversation and debate to have in the community, because it helps make explicit the values and shared goals within the Sakai community. For the initial institutions investing heavily in this new product category for Sakai, naming was a significant act (as Noah articulates very well); and though perhaps we arrived at something far from perfect, we made a stab at it and then have kept our primary focus on critical areas of the managed project. At the end of the day, naming is perhaps not our most important act; so we’re more focused on trying to document user scenarios, having design-led development, QAing the code we’re creating, and seeking additional like-minded partners in contributing to the project. Like the Sakai CLE (Collaboration and Learning Environment), the Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE) will be rechristened hundreds of times by the institutions that adopt it. If the project doesn’t ultimately deliver something of value, all the creative naming and marketing in the world won’t make a bit of difference. And I’m actually more than half serious with the suggestion that if your institution(s) contribute individually or combined 500K to 1M in cash to the project, you can name it anything you want and you’d get my vote immediately.
David, everything you say is totally reasonable, except I’d really urge you to rethink what you say at the end. I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interest to be intimating that Sakai is primarily an institutionally-focused project driven by whoever ponies up the most funds. There are many ways to contribute to an open source project, and the Sakai world would foreclose a lot (like, for example, building up interest and mindshare among potential users, who might promote OAE/3 to their institutions) if you reduce it to this.
I’ll stop now; as we all agree, there are more important things to worry about, and it’s not my intent to offend people. I really do respect the work you’re doing.
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