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.

When I was the web services manager for one of Canada's largest largest library consortia, my mentor/co-worker/friend Maureen Woods taught me a lot of what I know about how to ensure the success of large collaborative projects.

One thing that Maureen taught me was that "as long as the process has been open and inclusive, the folks are always right. Even if the experts don't think so, even if industry trends clearly show that they're wrong, it doesn't matter, because that's where they're at right now and they need to learn their mistakes in order to get where they're going." Roughly.

So? Well, this is where the Sakai community is at right now, struggling with balancing local and community need.

From what I've read, it seems that the Sakai project used to be guided in a more centralized fashion (perhaps "too" centralized?). Since getting involved late last year, I have noticed an almost "burned finger" reaction when I try to bring up the idea of the foundation providing leadership/direction on issues that are important to the community as a whole.

So if the foundation is not able to provide this sort of leadership and these sorts of resources, then it is up to the Sakai member community to do it. However, Zach is absolutely right when he says "crossing institutional boundaries is fairly unnatural". Of course every institution thinks first about their staff, their users, their budgets, their hardware, their network, their feature requests, etc. etc..

The good news is that another mentor/co-worker/friend of mine from the University of Alberta Libraries, Doug Poff, introduced me to the idea of "collaboration at the core" (of organizations and job descriptions). The basic notion is that staff is hired locally, but, because their organization's corporate culture embraces collaboration, they are supported and encouraged to find an appropriate balance with respect to working to meet local needs and working to meet the needs of the greater community.

Which gets us one crucial step closer.

In hierarchical organizations, I think that corporate culture is usually modelled by the officers, and tends to flow down. However, in more inherently collaborative organizations like universities, corporate culture is often much more fluid and usually open to greater influence from all staffmembers.

So what does this all add up to? Well, according to my argument, many of us may be able to influence our corporate culture, thereby making our jobs and our institutions more "collaborative at the core", or, in other words, just plain "Sakai community-minded". So let's get started fixing the problem!

Suggested Informal Solutions:

• Make the decision in your daily work to fix an existing community problem before working on something that your local institution wants. Choose something that you're weak in, so that your increase in skills has a tangible benefit to your organization as well: documentation, logging, unit tests, interfaces, working with interface designers, database tuning, etc.
• If you're good at something, document it for your local institution. Then become a "community expert" by copying that info to the Sakai Best Practices wiki. If that spot's somehow not appropriate, email Peter Knoop and make a suggestion, or come up with your own interim solution.
• Encourage everyone you work with to have a blog to talk about Sakai and to never never never be scared to post their opinions to the lists.

Suggested Formal Solutions:

• Make sure your bosses understand that Open Source software is not about saving money, it's about increasing involvement, increasing local skillsets, providing choices, and developing a community that makes decisions for itself.
• Ask your bosses for permission to fix a local problem "globally". Tell them that it will take longer than if you fixed it in house, but you are working with other Sakai institutions to coordinate not fixing the same problems over and over. Then actually do the hard work of coordinating solutions with whatever Sakai members are willing to work with you, thereby leading by example.
• Openly request to your bosses, and the community, that Sakai technologies and features be frozen until X, Y, and Z are accomplished. Seriously -- what three things -- technical, organizational, process, or other -- do you think the community really really really needs to get a better handle on if this is going to work? (Please feel free to add comments below this post).
• Lastly, and most importantly, ensure that your administrators and instructors go to the Sakai conferences. Once there, create a Birds of a Feather for whatever formal or informal groups you've managed to bring together and invite your administrators to come meet the others who are involved and to learn and share, firsthand, the benefits of this new more collaborative work style.

If anyone (especially Zach, Harriet, your anonymous commenter, and any other commenters you may still get) wants to talk further about organization or processes in the Sakai community, I would be happy to be involved.