Community building is a difficult thing to do. I've been involved in two developing communities over the past months. SAKAI and Open Solaris and they are both fascinating. I have managed many large scale development projects with huge numbers of developers both on site and in distributed environments. I am a big supporter of community development and have used it for many years on my development projects. Having been involved in these high profile projects and a few on Java.Net have helped me refine the development process I'll use on my next project.
I believe there is a place for open source, community source and bespoke purpose-built software where they seek to solve different problems. More thoughts on this later.
I have been blown away by the success of Open Solaris. In only 2 days there is a massive community and growing very quickly. The guys have done a great job in putting the right tools in place to support virtual collaboration.
The coolest thing about the Open Solaris community is the Sun Studio 10 compiler to build the OS. It rocks and is blazing fast.
I can't wait to see how this evolves...build your own OS and then build your own eLearning apps....now that's choice.
I'm off on a much needed vacation now but when I come back I'll be setting up SAKAI and Moodle on Open Solaris.
Stay tuned for build instructions appearing on www.sun.com/edu

After a long 4 days at the Community Source Conference for SAKAI, OSPI and uPortal, I'm taking a short break and heading home for a day of painting before returning for the uPortal part of the conference where I'll be presenting some ideas on uPortal and Identity.
On Thursday I kicked off the first face-to-face meeting in my new role as Chair of the SAKAI Performance Working Group where we discussed a process for capturing lessons learned from the two big production deployments of SAKAI a Michigan and Indiana. This information will be captured in the collaboration site and factored into what we hope will be useful information to other schools seeking to deploy SAKAI as well as hints to inform the architecture team to address manageability, maintainability and other non-functional systemic requirements as well as performance characteristics.
As usual the real work gets done in the hallways where I managed to catch up with with some of my UK colleagues doing great work on the JISC projects and the awesome research at the CARET organization.

I've just installed Moodle on my Solaris x86 workstation after hearing about the performance problems some teachers were having running it on their Mac OS X server. It seems MySQL craters at over 15 connections on the new version 10.5 so they are forced to deploy onto linux in production.
After compiling PHP with the enable-fastCGI switch it's just a matter of configuring the JES Webserver for the PHP modules - similar to Apache.
You could of course use the Apache webserver bundled with your free download of Solaris x86.
Here it is running on my W2100z

Full configuration instructions coming shortly.
Now to setup authentication to the JES Directory Server...

Sooner that I though but here it is...

e-Books to be delivered on a Sony PSP along with magazine subscriptions. With an e-Book reader students can sync their PSP through a USB cable or wireless bridge to the school LMS host and download the latest book lists for their course.


The PSP has a memory stick for persisting state enabling the book reader to use personal bookmarks, notes and track progress is the developers choose to take advantage of it.
Their progress and interaction could then be uploaded to the school or university host system to record their progress against their e-Portfolio and/or student record system.

Now all we need is the browser for the perfect thin client device we know will be in every kids schoolbag along with their ipod.