A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was interested in doing a bit of freelance consulting for OSP. A couple people asked me if I was available/interested in doing work outside of OSP for Sakai in general. Of course, I am. The Reports tool (now core, like the rest of the OSP tools suite) seems to blur the boundaries between OSP and Sakai. In a nutshell, the reports tool allows someone to define SQL based reports that can be run against the live database or a set of data warehouse tables (you may have noticed a bunch of tables named "dw_xxxxx" in your instance). To complicate matters, much of the data related to portfolios are stored in XML on the file system and are therefore unavailable to the reports tool unless converted. The system is powerful, but poorly understood by the community and sparsely documented.

I have set up an account and a project at fundable.com to see what sort of interest the community has for this effort.

The Sakai Reports tool documentation needs improvement.

Many schools deploying OSP as a portfolio system want to use custom reports to aggregate data for institutional purposes. The reports that the community has included in the OOTB experience have little to do with the type of data that schools would actually want to report about. Building custom reports for your institution makes a lot of sense, but very few schools have been successful at it because they just don't know how.

I would be interested in investigating and writing related community documentation in Sakai confluence if anyone is interested in funding my independent effort to do so. My initial guess is that I will probably need to also document the job scheduler and the data warehouse in order to successfully move the documentation forward. While it is difficult to promise a "complete package" will result from my effort I feel that a few good interviews and some time devoted to understanding and disseminating the capabilities (and limitations) of the report tool functionality would benefit the entire Sakai community.

I'm sitting on our porch swing on a hot Saturday morning. My kids (2 and 5 years old) just ate their pancakes and are playing in the sprinkler and plastic pool. It's going to be a hot one and I probably need to break down and put the air conditioners in the windows today. For the first weekend in quite some time, I am probably not going to work…on anything…on portfolios, Sakai, coursework, side projects…nothing…I'm going to spend some family time.

Last month I finished my long-in-coming master's degree in Information Management at the iSchool at Syracuse. My eight-year stint at Syracuse University supporting students and faculty is complete. I did all that I could to make my recommendations for next steps and close the projects associated with the grants that funded the Living SchoolBook.

I don't have a "real job" right now, at least not in the sense that I really wanted or planned for. Without getting into the details, I am currently paying the bills working on a couple of Sakai/OSP and Drupal related projects out my home. While I enjoy working with the Sakai and OSP community and software, there are issues with doing this sort of work as an independent consultant.

First of all, a lot of what makes working with an open source project a very rewarding experience is the opportunity to "get in the game" and participate in the "upstream discussion". When employed by SU, I was encouraged (and paid) to participate where I could and to help shape the direction of the software in a manner consistent with our objectives. As an independent consultant, I feel that I still need to participate and not be a "free rider" on the community of professionals that work so hard to make this useful software. However, I recognize that I will rarely be paid to engage in these conversations and I do so at my own short-term loss…one less beach trip for my family in exchange for my personal gratification and credibility in this meritocracy-driven community.

Second, there is all of the "meta-work" associated with managing your own micro-business. Filling your own business pipeline, creating invoices, learning the business tax rules and all of that sort of stuff is more time spent not DOING anything that adds value to any project or my quality of life. I hardly even know what I am talking about here…I am so green…

I am passively pursuing an option for more "stable" employment in the community, but part of me asks (Letterman-style), "Is this anything?" about the whole Sakai/OSP self-employment idea. I wonder what sort of demand there is for someone like me to provide consulting services to schools looking to engage in agile, short-term projects around the OSP tool suite.

It strikes me that with the right people in the room, a small, devoted team could make great strides in an OSP project in just a 1 or 2 week sprint if they had just a little "leg up" and just-in-time "support". I could provide that "leg up" and help a small team to make something useful quickly, document ideas for new enhancements and features…and LEAVE when they want me to. The transaction costs within a small team are much less expensive than between that team and me, so knowing when to leave (and for schools to know when to tell me to leave) is an important decision that an institution would need to make in order to ensure that they were getting the biggest ROI on the project.

I think that these sorts of sessions could spin-off a lot of documented examples and material to contribute to the community library (the OSP community's emerging body of knowledge around deployment strategies and data structures). I could play a role in documenting projects I am involved in and ensuring that they are contributed for others to use.

Keep in mind, this is not necessarily something I believe is sustainable as a business model long-term; however, given my current situation, I would be willing to discuss how this model might work (or not) for individual institutions. This sort of short-term employment would simultaneously add value to the community and (I believe) be a low-cost way to start getting productive with OSP with real, tangible results that we build together. If this is something you think you want to talk about, let me know.

Today I followed up my discussion with the same representatives that I sent this email to with the following message:

The responses to the proposal I made last week were tentatively positive, including some local support from SU. The comments everyone provided were very helpful to me and have encouraged me to pursue the idea further. My first set of emails were directed at individuals to "feel out" the situation. My gut tells me that a discussion of a community position is better held "out in the light", rather than through personal emails. What do you think?

From my perspective, this is an interesting position position to be in. Given that this is probably a temporary position, it isn't everyday that we see someone WILLING to give up their secure position within their own organization to work on the shared problems of the community. I have a window of time to offer this idea and bang on doors to see who is interested. After a couple of months (or less if the idea is rejected) the window will close and I'll have to be more serious about exploring my other options.

Many of the people I spoke with encouraged me to connect with IU, UMich and rSmart about this idea first (if I had not done so already). These groups are seen as the "central drivers" (their term) of OSP. My sense is that if these schools supported a community position, others might as well (although no one said that they had a check in hand contingent on that condition!) Investment in a position like this seems to be a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Groups are willing to consider it if we could get others to simultaneously invest. Some advice was provided that suggested that a starting point might be a voluntary contribution to a community fund of $5-10K per organization.

One response said that there should be some more leadership/coordination in OSP. While I think that was a vote of confidence for the my proposal, I would push back a little on the "leadership" idea. I wouldn't want to be seen as the person *setting* the direction of OSP, but I would be interested in *articulating*, *communicating* and *facilitating* the community vision for portfolio software in Sakai. I would be interested in finding ways for the smaller schools (many of which would have a hard time funding this position) to play a role in the community processes. Some have suggested that projects like how-to guides or white papers might be particularly interesting projects for me to perform and might be willing to fund. I would be VERY interested in more ideas like this that might be specific outcomes that the community would like to see performed.

The conference in Newport Beach was very productive for me. I presented (or co-presented) in a few sessions and I spent time talking with members of the community at various institutions. I have been pretty open about my employment situation and I think some schools and vendors were sending me some reassuring signals about prospects somewhere else. I must have felt empowered by that, because after a brief discussion with the attendees at the OSP post conference session on Friday, I started to wonder if I didn't have another option worth floating by the community.

This is the email I sent out to a lot of folks that I thought would be interested in funding a Sakai community position to try to devote someone's time to coordination of the many different aspects of the Open Source Portfolio development for a little while.

For several years, I have heard each of us talk about what a challenge it is to balance the effort between "local needs" and "community efforts" within the Sakai community. As we struggle to quickly demonstrate value of the open source model to our respective administrations, it is easy to forget the risks and hidden costs incurred by everyone using the software in order to achieve short term wins for our local institutions. We have all recognized a need to be able to thoughtfully consider, shape and select development projects in a manner that represents our shared direction. At the Newport Beach conference I was encouraged by the approval of a process to shape, approve and develop high quality projects going forward.

Some of us talked about the need to not only plan our software together, but also to be able to work together to leverage our own scarce resources to execute those plans. We recognized that many of our member institutions are particularly well versed in various aspects of these projects (pedagogy, systems analysis, design, programming, QA and documentation), but none of us have all of those resources focused on the OSP project at any one time. This sort of distributed development will likely require a fair amount of community coordination.

It is not a secret that I am going to be going through a transition as soon as the grant funding that pays for my position at Syracuse dries up. One option I may have is to work within one of the schools or companies that are committed to the OSP software. I am sure I would enjoy working at any one of the schools or for a vendor that was involved in the project. If I did, I am sure that I would find opportunity to continue to contribute to the project in ways that are in alignment with that organization's goals. Not surprisingly, most of us can't magically create positions to bring in new people at a moment's notice. However, each school/vendor may have some discretionary funding to spend on the project that is left unallocated. With that assumption in mind, I wonder if there is another option that may allow me to contribute in ways as an agent of the community as a whole.

I'd like to explore the possibility of a new position (made possible through contributed funding to the Sakai Foundation) of an OSP Project Coordinator that would be funded by the commitment of resources from our member institutions in order to ensure that an agent of the community was always available to do the work of communicating community vision, planning the work of the OSP project and organizing community efforts. I realize that paving my own road is probably a risky idea, but I think it may be a great way to stay plugged in and benefit the community in a way that I couldn't as an agency of AN institution. Given enough contributors, the individual contributions may be small to support such a position. It is a creative solution to keep myself employed as well as meet an important community need. I would be looking to Syracuse to simply give me a small office, access to some services and continue my benefits package as an in kind contribution.

Do you think that there would be any interest from the community to fund such a position? If so, what would be the stipulations on funding it? Do you feel it would increase the likelihood of success of of OSP? Or would it be perceived as just stealing money from local efforts?

For the past few years I have been managing the technology side of a PT3 grant for the School of Education at Syracuse University. Our research group was called the The Living SchoolBook, where I wrote about the project. The goals of the proposal included multiple initiatives meant to improve the education of future teachers. One of these goals included improvements to the assessment of the teacher preparation programs (which happened to coincide/collide with a simultaneous accreditation effort for the school). Another included the development of a technical system that would allow students to publish and highlight elements of their own learning.

My role was to document the technical requirements of the systems needed and to manage a small team of designers and developers as we built it. We eventually settled on the Sakai/OSP platform as a starting point for a our project. Our development effort consisted of the Goal Management project, which began to incorporate elements of the Sakai courseware tools as components of the OSP portfolio tools. This idea has found some enthusiastic supporters from other Sakai community members, including rSmart, RINET and Indiana University.

In May of 2008, the PT3 grant funding will end. While I had some hopes that I would be kept on to further develop and implement the portfolio tools, I was recently told that the school would probably not be funding the idea. The cost of maintaining an instance of Sakai is difficult to justify for the financially strapped college, which can use the University supplied enterprise BlackBoard instance "for free".

Today I am heading out to Newport Beach to further disseminate the work we have done and to talk with other colleges and vendors to see what the prospects look like for continuing to work in the Sakai community.