Zach posted a nice piece he called "A Modest Proposal" in which he identifies the challenge of balancing local versus Sakai community needs:

"Wouldn’t it be better if our best people had the mandate and the money to solve community problems full-time, instead of heroically squeezing it in between dinner and Conan O’Brien...."

He then finishes:

"I worry that we think this is going to iron itself out. The fact is, crossing institutional boundaries is fairly unnatural, and it’s going to take an intelligent template and a force of will to make it work as well as it should. Our problems are not technical, they’re organizational. Solving them is worth it because we stand a chance of closing the gap and getting what we need and want out of our systems, on our terms. Anybody interested?"

The phrase that jumped out at me was "Our problems are not technical, they're organizational."

I could not agree more, and here's why.

Sorry, folks, had the incorrect URI for the image I had uploaded (I'm still learning the corners of this CMS).

Here is is: http://www.moosetrout.com/files/sakai-meat4.jpg

Here's a quickie remix of a screenshot that Lance posted on his blog; I think the whole thing is so odd that I may just have to get a t-shirt made for the Atlanta conference....

As mentioned in my last blog post, when I attended the Vancouver conference I was excited by how efficient it was to locate like-minded individuals, and how easy it was to avoid "mailing list momentum". Unfortunately, with UWinnipeg's official go-live to faculty and students this week, I did *not* make the Breeze meeting that I had hoped to. Next time....

I just got off the phone with Anthony Whyte; I was looking for information on the Sakai Commercial Affiliates program (I'm looking for more schools to work with since my hours with University of Winnipeg will probably be decreasing at the end of September).