Monday, November 11, 2013

Thoughts about VI Spanish Sakai Madrid '13

On 7 and 8 of November, I participated in the 6th Spanish Sakai Meeting in Madrid. I always enjoy these meetings because it's time to see friends and learn a lot about what are doing the rest of Spanish Sakaigers, and why not, feel that you are not alone in a country of moodlers.



On this edition, we shared our experiences, fun, and a lot of commitment to the Sakai community. Probably, it was the most productive Spanish meeting I ever assisted, because we got a lot of synergy between the members.


This meeting was highly supported from Sakai Community and Apereo Foundation with the presence of Dr. +Ian Dolphin  (Executive Director of the Apereo Foundation) y Dr. +Neal Caidin   (Sakai Community Coordinator). They gave us their vision about how the community is going on. They reflected the importance of the engagement of S2U (renamed to Spanish Sakai Users) with Sakai Community and they encouraged us to keep working and being involved more and more.

During the presentations we could see a lot of interesting things like a list of new features that will appear on Sakai 10 by +Neal Caidin. A new recommendations system that use LTI by Angel Ruiz y Alberto Corbí from UNIR (a new member of S2U).  xAPI LMS integration thoughts by Samoo,   and many others that make that session very exciting.

Also, I had time to do some presentations about Video chat on Sakai made with +Juan Jose Meroño Sánchez , the UdL 2.9 migration experience, and a funny session named "Let’s be honest, things that we dislike about Sakai". In that session we played with the "Sincerity ball". People were throwing the ball to each other and talking about their concerns about Sakai, and discovered which things of Sakai we would like to change. I consider the session was successful because I got what I was looking for, a constructive session with a lot of ideas to improve Sakai, and a way to start to work closer with the Sakai Community.

The most common concerns were focused on the interface and usability, most notably on the oldest tools that don't incorporate functions or components that we are accustomed to seeing today. Other functions people miss were:  The way the information is imported or exported; how notifications are managed depending the tool; Or the state of development of some core tools. All these things must be analysed and dive on it to understand why people feel these things.  

But if I have to choose one session, I choose the talk about "How to contribute" by UM members +Juan Jose Meroño Sánchez and +Jose Mariano Luján. They explained to us their experience collaborating with Sakai Community, contributing on solving bugs and adding new features. That opens a door to all the members of the S2U to do things better in terms of collaboration, and it gives a comfortable way to contribute our efforts.

You can find the videos of all the sessions here:
First part
Second part

The last day, we focused on organize ourselves and we formed teams to work on different topics. These groups will work on Jira Triage, i18n ,general bugs and features, and security.

I had to mention the extraordinary work made by the S2U representation members +Diego del Blanco Orobitg  and +Jose Mariano Lujan organizing this event. Also thanks the work of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and all the sponsors.

It feels like S2U gears turning again, and it seems to work better than ever. Perhaps the leadership role that Murcia University has assumed has encouraged others to be more proactive with the Sakai community and each other. I believe that in a short time the group's work will pay off