Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: What is OKI, and what should dotLRN's relationship with it be?

If OKI lives, it will be through Sakai. And as somebody who now has access to the internal Sakai community discussion (SUNY is a SEPP member), I can say with confidence that Sakai will do just fine. My best guess at the moment is that version 2.0, due out this summer, can really be thought of as analogous to Apple OS X's first public release, i.e., it'll work, and parts will be cool, but there will still be many rough edges. I imagine it will be a few more years before it lives up to its potential.

In the interim, one way to think about Sakai is as a collection Java frameworks for developing uPortal-compatible learning tools with some reference implementations along for the ride. (See http://weblogs.java.net/blog/simstu/archive/2004/09/sakai_open_sour.html for a developer's perspective on this point.) To the extent that the project continues to use OKI, then OKI will survive, whether or not MIT continues to support it. (In some ways, MIT is the last institution I would use to gauge adoption of anything--even stuf they have created themselves.) As the framework that is Sakai matures, we'll see what happens to OKI.