Product Council

As significant new features emerge from research and development projects in Sakai they can be incorporated into an official Sakai release. In May 2009 the Sakai Foundation established the first Sakai Product Council to help structure the process of these new capabilities emerging in Sakai.

Sakai Product Council Charge

The Sakai Product Council will act on behalf of the broad Sakai community to ensure the exceptional quality and cohesiveness of Sakai product releases in their support of varied teaching, research and collaboration needs.  It does this formally by determining those projects which will go into a release, and informally by advising projects as they progress from R&D to production-ready maturity.  The Product Council will undertake its work:

 - by employing the expertise of its members
 - through direct consultation with experts in the community
 - with reference to best practices for technology, pedagogy and standards
 - by establishing and communicating clear and objective criteria
 - with a transparent process that allows review and comment from the community

Product Council Members

Nate Angell -- Nate works with clients in education and open source communities for rSmart,  a Sakai Commercial Affiliate. Nate previously led web communications at Portland State University and at the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry. Nate holds an MA in film, television, and digital media studies from Brown University.

Noah Botimer -- Noah is the ePortfolio Technical Lead for the University of Michigan. He is an open source and open education advocate. Before joining Michigan, Noah helped establish a campus-wide Sakai course and ePortfolio environment at Saginaw Valley State University.

Eli Cochran -- Eli joined UC Berkeley and the Sakai community two years ago as a user experience designer and Javascript programmer on the Fluid project. After more than twenty years experience in interface design and development,  Eli feels that successful systems must be more than understandable and usable, they must also be beautiful and fun.

Michael Feldstein -- Michael is Principal Product Manager, Academic Enterprise Solutions at Oracle and the author of the e-Literate weblog. He is a frequent invited speaker on instructional technology and has been interviewed about e-learning by media outlets including The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Associated Press, and U.S. News and World Report.

Clay Fenlason -- Clay is the Sakai Foundation Product Manager. He spearheaded Boston University's entry into the Sakai partnership in early 2004. Since then he has been a vocal and active member of the community at a number of levels, and was named one of the inaugural Sakai fellows in May of 2006. In late 2006 Clay joined Georgia Tech as Director of Educational Technology. Throughout, his keenest interest has been in the nature and health of the organization and the community source model for higher education.

David Goodrum -- David is Director of Academic and Faculty Services for University Information Technology Services at Indiana University. In addition he chairs the functional requirements committee as well as the support and implementation team for IU's implementation of Sakai.

John Lewis -- John is the Chief Software Architect for Unicon and a 17-year veteran of the software engineering industry. His passions include open source and agile methods. John is active in several higher education open source communities, including uPortal and Sakai, and serves on the Board of Directors of Jasig.

Stephen Marquard -- Stephen is Learning Technologies Co-ordinator in the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town, where he leads the team responsible for the University's popular and widely-used Sakai deployment known as Vula. Stephen is a Sakai Fellow and serves on the Sakai Board of Directors.

John Norman -- John is the Director of the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies and 'Head of e-Learning' at the University of Cambridge. CARET provides infrastructure and support to the campus for the use of technology in teaching, learning and research, including the deployment of Sakai campus-wide. Prior to this he had experience as an engineer and medical devices entrepreneur on 3 continents. John chairs the advisory board for OSS-Watch and is an advocate for open standards and open source software in higher education.

Max Whitney -- Max is the technical team lead for enterprise academic services in ITS at New York University and an active member in the DIY technology communities in New York. She has managed the Blackboard implementation at NYU since 2001, most recently acting as the technical lead for an enterprise upgrade impacting 110,000 users. She also led the Sakai pilot at NYU in 2007. She received her M.S. in Computer Science at NYU's Courant Institute.