General informationThe Sakai Project began as a $6.8 million community source softwaredevelopment project founded by the University of Michigan, IndianaUniversity, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative(OKI). The purpose of the project, which received a $2.4 million grantfrom the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was to produce open sourceCollaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software. The Sakai Partners Program(SPP) extends this community source project to other academicinstitutions around the world, and is supported by the William andFlora Hewlett Foundation and SPP member contributions.
In October 2005, the Sakai Project announced the creation of the Sakai Foundation,a non-profit membership corporation to provide a permanent home for thegrowing Sakai community. The Sakai Foundation provides Sakaidevelopers, adopters, and users a place to coordinate efforts.
"Sakai" is not an acronym; it is simply the name given to theproject and the software, initially conceived as extending the CHEFtechnology architecture. CHEF, nearly an acronym for "CompreHensivecollaborativE Framework", was an online system designed and implementedat the University of Michigan to enable online communities to maintainrelationships and share information. Chef Sakai is a Japanese cookingartist.
For further information about key people, the structure of theprogram, core and partner institutions, and details on Sakaiinstallation and setup, visit the Sakai web site.
Educational Community LicenseSakai uses the Educational Community License,which is an approved Open Source Initiative license. Under this"open/open" license, the source code is available for unrestricteddevelopment by commercial or noncommercial entities, and it does notimpose use of a particular license on derivative works. The Sakai useof the Educational Community License is posted on the Sakai software license page.
Anyone can use the Educational Community License by changing thecopyright line to list the institution name (or individual name, ifappropriate) and the copyright year. The Sakai Project stronglyencourages use of the Educational Community License to facilitate easysoftware code reuse and sharing.
The Sakai softwareThe Sakai software will run on a wide range of systems, from desktopcomputers through a small multiprocessor system through a clusteredscalable environment. Sakai provides configuration options for small,medium, and large installations, and is targeted to meet the scaling,localization, and support demands of all such applications. Fordetails, visit the Sakai Features List page.
DemoTo try Sakai, visit the collab.sakaiproject.org/portal demo, accessible to anyone.
Download SakaiFor the latest release of Sakai, visit the Sakai site, and click Latest Release on the left.
Timeline for releasesLong-term plans for the future include releases in roughly November and May of each year.
HelpThis Knowledge Base contains help documentation for users of theSakai software. Enter your search terms in the search box near the topof the page. The same content appears in the Help tool within the Sakaisoftware.
The Sakai CommunitySakai activities are mostly organized within Discussion Groups and Working Groups on the collab.sakaiproject.org site and the Sakai Confluence wiki. Each group has individual facilitators, or in some cases, several people share such responsibility. For more, see the Sakai Community page.
Development and bug trackingSakai employs the Confluence enterprise wiki for reviewing, reporting, and resolving Sakai development activities, and Jirato track and manage issues, including bug reports, tasks, and featurerequests. Both Confluence and Jira allow users to add comments and,where permitted, to create and modify existing pages.