Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to dotLRN Governace

From the technical side it is a port of the 3.4 ACES project to the [Open]ACS4.x platform.  I put "Open" in brackets because the work mostly  involves moving to the acs_objects paradigm and using subsiting and other new tools to implement the partitioning of the main site that's needed (i.e. each class will have its own subsite rather than each being built on the user group facility).

So the work is mostly adapting aD work from a 3.x platform to a 4.x platform.  Yet I don't want to belittle the OpenACS component - there will be a new portals package built upon the acs-service-contract model that will yield entities that can be utilized by plenty of other  clients (including vanilla .adp pages - portlet use won't be confined to the portals sphere, as portlets will fulfill a general contract that can be request by a variety of clients, including the new portals package).

I think folks will have to lay off and wait for another month or so.  I'm not speaking as an insider. entirely - obviously I have input into overall OpenACS design issues but this is a contract with OpenForce and Sloan (though I'm sorta a subcontractor - but only "sorta").  OpenForce is doing their best to merge client needs with the general applicability that folks want to see in OpenACS 4.  We - meaning the OpenACS community and Sloan/MIT - share a common vision in wanting the resulting code base to be widely used and of course entirely Open Source (though Sloan/MIT themselves use Oracle).  No need to worry on that front, OK?  Clearly our community can change the result that's released in public if certain aspects that Sloan asks for seem "wrong"  to us.  Of course, Sloan's trying to minimize the transition effort for their current ACES users (i.e. all of Sloan) so they'll be forgiven if certain UI, etc, aspects get copied that don't seem optimimum.  And ... they're open to change long-term, in my experience, having worked on SloanSpace before.

So ... I view this as being very much a collaborative experience.  Sloan/MIT will hold things under wraps in the near term because of tight deadlines (they expect to roll this out as a replacement for next semester, and that includes moving over all data, i.e. bboards, calendars, documents etc).  I expect them to be a source of new ideas for improving their site - in ways that will impact everyone positively - in the future.  Certainly that's been my experience in the past, dealing with them.  They're not the only folks on the planet, for instance, that want the Calendar package to generate iCalendar files so Outlook/KOrganizer/Enlightenment etc can synch with the website!