Gave a former coworker, Stu, from my Valdosta State days a heads up about a complaint my brother heard from a close friend of his. Stu is working with Sakai these days at Georgia Institute of Technology. He made an interesting comment:

It would be great to have all the energy your team puts into Blackboard be put into Sakai instead.

One of the unknowns which always seems to come up in talking about Sakai or Moodle is hiring a development staff. How many programmers we need depends on how much customization we will need to implement. Certainly finding the programmers is another problem. A large fear is we’d need 10 programmers and years to implement all the features people insist are critical. People need to be told. “No, you will have to live without that feature,” which would be very cool… However, it would be like your ISP telling you, “Sorry, we turned off port 80. You will have to live without it.” Finding the balance between features we can abandon, features which would need to be created pre-go-live, and features we can post-go-live? Difficult enough when you have 15,000 users. It seems more than 10x harder with over 150,000 users.

Surely people have cracked this nut?

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