-Note the original post was from both the Berklee and Sloan teams and was seen and approved by everyone on the teams, hence the formal language. The following is only my personal opinion.
Dear Don,
I'm very sorry you feel you have not been consulted. I was under the impression that Sloan was contracting you do the very first non-Open Force .LRN package (Homework Drop-Box) specifically so you could use it to model best practices. My understanding was that you had already received the spec. Sounds like there has been some confusion. Please call me voice tomorrow.
I think I do speak for both institutions and the programmers when I say we are 100% behind and wish to be a part of OpenACS, however, the "We" in the above post was not ".LRN", but the two specific teams of developers who are using .LRN to create specific client sites, with concrete defined requirements, and very strict deadlines. If you read this announcement closely, you'll notice that despite the fact we are less the 2 miles apart, both doing web sites that support classes for universities, the only piece we found to really collaborate on in the short term is Survey. Basically we are at the point of saying. "We both need survey and neither team has started on it yet." "We" are not the OpenACS community. "We" are not .LRN. "We" are not ArsDigita. "We" are two separate teams focused on our deadlines and deliverables.
After we meet these deadlines, these two specific websites will "gift" this code back to .LRN and then we as individuals and community members will certainly hope to work with you and the rest of the community in building and improving .LRN and OpenACS.
When I was at ArsDigita, I tried and completely failed to explain to my management that what we had really built for Sloan was an intranet. As programmers it's obvious to us that these packages have extensive general usefulness across industries. I learned the hard way that this is not obvious to business people. They think in terms of Industries and Sectors.
The way I see it is .LRN is a "brand". It is a distinction we can make while marketing to help us communicate with educational customers that we understand their problem and have a proven tool to help them solve it. From a technical point of view it is my individual opinion that it is best for all of us for .LRN and OpenACS to be as close as possible.
Again, these are my personal opinions and vision, they do not necessarily reflect Sloan, Berklee, Open Force or .LRN!
