sakaiproject.org

Press Release: February 9, 2004

Sakai Educational Partners Program

Ann Arbor, Michigan -- The Sakai Project announces the launch of the Sakai Educational Partner’s Program (SEPP) with a $300,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The role of SEPP is to further the development and adoption of open source Sakai Project software in higher education. The SEPP will provide the staff and services to ensure a long-term community for sustaining and evolving Sakai-based software. Founding Partners include

• Carnegie Mellon University
• Columbia University
• Cornell University
• Foothill-DeAnza Community Colleges
• Harvard University
• Northwestern University
• Princeton University
• Tufts University
• University of Colorado
• University of California-Berkeley
• University of California-Davis
• University of California-LA
• University of California-Merced
• University of Hawaii
• University of Oklahoma
• University of Virginia
• University of Washington
• University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Yale University

Partners contribute $10,000 annually with a three year commitment. The partner’s program facilitates technical collaboration, developer training, strategy briefings, and software sharing among universities. Partners receive access to SEPP technical staff, pre-release code, developer workshops, and access to an online Sakai Project knowledgebase managed by Indiana University.

The Sakai Board has also named Jim Farmer as SEPP Community Development Manager to begin working with partners. Farmer has extensive experience with building diverse, open source communities through his work on uPortal with JA-SIG.

“Leading universities of all sizes are seeing the economic value and shared innovation in open source software. The Founding Partner list demonstrates the broad applicability of the Sakai Project from research-intensive universities to community colleges,” said Joseph Hardin, Chairman of the Sakai Project Board. The Sakai Software will remain open source and free to anyone. There is no requirement to join the SEPP to use the software. “The SEPP provides a self-funding community to share best practices, leverage knowledgeable staff, and extend the Sakai software for years to come” said Brad Wheeler, Indiana University. Membership in SEPP is only open to educational institutions, and partner’s can join at any later date as well.

The $6.8M Sakai Project was created through a collaboration of the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford University and a $2.4M grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project is affiliated with the uPortal Project of JA-SIG and the Open Knowledge Initiative.

Additional Sakai information will be posted at www.sakaiproject.org.