Forum .LRN Q&A: Achieving Greater Transparency with dotLRN development...

We are quite close to the launch of dotLRN at MIT Sloan. We want to focus now on getting the community involved in ongoing development. How can we make the process more transparent? What's the best mechanism for letting a thousand flowers bloom? I look forward to your comments. --Al Essa

At the top of my wish list are a bug-tracker (sdm) as well as a document that describes different use-cases of dotLRN. I would like to see descriptions of how to plug in custom applications in the framework as well as how to customize dotLRN to make it fit different types of education (schools, universities, distance teaching etc.).

It seems dotLRN does not distinguish itself from other learning platforms so much by its feature set but rather by being Open Source and well designed, and thus easy to extend and configure. This selling point should be emphasized in the documentation.

OpenForce has indicated that they will have a bug tracker up by the end of the month. Similarly, Sloan commits to post a draft use case document by the end of the month.
Quick correction - a bug tracker up by end of August :) It's going
to take us a little while longer. We are just beginning work with
Lars's bug tracker.
One thing that needs figuring out - which pieces belong in OpenACS 4 proper, which remain as dotLRN specific stuff?  Some pieces developed as part of the dotLRN project are already in the main tree (mail related stuff, for instance).  Other pieces clearly belong - new portal and various standard package portlets.  Other pieces don't - the dotLRN package and applets for instance.

We need to make a clear delineation at some point, though, so we can start planning our OpenACS 4.6 release.