Here's a post I made to the sakai-dg-ui list in response to a thread about using some fairly "heavyweight" design processes:

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I agree with Kathy about being careful not to set artificially high barriers to entry wrt improving Sakai UI/design.

There have been a few interesting threads on sakai-dev recently; today's post is an email I sent responding to a thread about establishing a "Sakai code convention".... (Sorry, I had to turn off anonymous comments after a recent upgrade broke the captcha module.)

Here's the body of an email that some of you will see on sakai-dev; I tried to provide a few ideas on how to include the bigger picture when making technology decisions, as well as some suggestions with respect to a community roadmap and supporting process:

Does your Firefox searchbar complain that it has not had a chance to contribute to the greater Sakai good?

Has your Firefox searchbar been bugging you to throw out those search plugins you don't use, to make control-e your friend, and to add a few Sakai-friendly search icons to its daily life?

Zach posted a nice piece he called "A Modest Proposal" in which he identifies the challenge of balancing local versus Sakai community needs:

"Wouldn’t it be better if our best people had the mandate and the money to solve community problems full-time, instead of heroically squeezing it in between dinner and Conan O’Brien...."

He then finishes:

"I worry that we think this is going to iron itself out. The fact is, crossing institutional boundaries is fairly unnatural, and it’s going to take an intelligent template and a force of will to make it work as well as it should. Our problems are not technical, they’re organizational. Solving them is worth it because we stand a chance of closing the gap and getting what we need and want out of our systems, on our terms. Anybody interested?"

The phrase that jumped out at me was "Our problems are not technical, they're organizational."

I could not agree more, and here's why.