Forum .LRN Q&A: Response to Request for Comment: dotLRN Technology Governance

I think what scares many people in this community is the fact that dotLRN is seeming to eclipse OpenACS
Well ... I worried about that when I met with resistance to putting the new portals stuff into our standard OpenACS. Not doing so would strongly position dotLRN as being the development platform of choice, rather than position it as being a vertical e-learning application which happens to feed back development tools into OpenACS proper.

That's why I think it's important that the TAB include OpenACS representation and that even more importantly that they be tasked to do their best to see that decisions as to what goes into dotLRN vs. what should be pushed into an OpenACS release be made solely on a technical basis.

Who can hold them accountable to this task in Ben's topless model? If there's no OpenACS representation on the TAB, as Ben suggests, will they take our needs into account?

On the other hand in Al's model it is clear who will assign them that task and who can hold them accountable.

Now ... the obvious question is whether or not Al's model leads to the TAB being tasked in this way. Al's plans, as stated to me, are to do this but they're not explicit in his loose outline. Maybe there needs to be some formalization of the fact that a key part of the plan is to see that there's technical representation of the OpenACS community on the TAB, and that not forking is a mandate.