EuroSakai presentation - Sakai Best Practices

Alan Berg and I just finished our presentation on Sakai Best Practices at EuroSakai Valencia 2010. It started with a mexican wave (all Alan's fantastic idea) and included tips for creating JIRA tickets, an overview of best ways to take advantage of foundation resources, and some development best practices.
One key point we made during the presentation bears repeating. In many ways the Sakai community is a do-ocracy.

A do-ocracy is an organizational structure in which individuals choose roles and tasks for themselves and execute them. Responsibilities attach to people who do the work, rather than elected or selected officials.

I have also heard people refer to Sakai as a meritocracy and perhaps in some ways it is. But much more than that I think it is driven forward by those willing to act. I hope that we are encouraging people to get involved and act because that is the lifeblood of community source.

The Spring Experience and RSF

I am attending the Spring Expereience in Hollywood, Florida this week (Dec 14, 2007) along with Antranig. It is exciting and scary to be around so many really great developers. It feels like everyone we talk to is doing something impressive and advanced with Spring. It is pretty intimidating to be around and talk to all these really great developers.

The sesssions have been really great so far. It is really hard to decide which sessions to attend because there have been a few slots where I wanted to attend all five talks. The presenters have actually written code in front of people which is great to see. I have had a chance to learn about the new Spring annotations, AspectJ, @MVC, and Testing. The material is advanced but that is what I want.

Antranig and I presented a rapid fire session on RSF. It was a one hour introduction to the goals and basics of RSF. We had a bit of technical trouble and the talk before us ran long but overall I felt really positive about the session. There were lots of good questions and we had about 25 people in the session. We even got a compliment on the wiki and documentation. I hope we will have a chance to talk with more people about RSF during the remainder of the conference.