I've been talking with the Survey Builder group out of UCLA, I've been talking to Ybos, I've been talking to Open Force. I've emailed my draft, which is hardly a spec at this point, to someone from UMass Donahue who emailed me in response to this post. I talk frequently to Michael Feldman. I've also gotten really good ideas on this subject in the past from the Berkman Center at Harvard.
The community is being involved before the draft of the spec is even done.
Well, this is news to me. First I heard of it. It's welcome news. That's a start. If you folks post a list of new features that you intend to implement, once you get that far, then that would be absolutely fantastic. We could even give you your own dotLRN forum if it would help.
Your posts are not exactly acting as positive reinforcement.
How can I give positive reinforcement when I'm kept in the dark?
Exactly what more do you want me to do?
A personal heads-up to the OpenACS project manager - me - would be useful. Keep in mind that folks ask me questions. "what's happpening?" "what's the plan?"
My stock answer - "I dunno, no one bothers to tell me" - gives folks little satisfaction.
So maybe a commitment to keep the OpenACS Project Leader informed in a broad, general way as to what the future looks like from Sloan's perspective? Not me, personally, but whoever fills that role, which happens to be me at the moment?
From a technical point of view we absolutely have to be sure .LRN and OACS are compatible, hopefully to the point of being almost the same thing. But please be tolerant of the fact that we will be trying to create a separate image that says education. This .LRN centric language will probably get worse not better in the next year or two. This separation does not mean that technically we don't consider ourselves part of the community
There's nothing wrong with this at all. In fact, the community has anticipated this in discussions held last year. We've talked about the notion of "vertical apps" and the fact that dotLRN is our first instance built on the OACS 4 framework. We've talked about branding as being important in the "vertical app" space. People have talked about other branded vertical apps that might evolve in the future. A replacement for Raiser's Edge, for instance. The follow-on to e-base is currently planned to be such an OpenACS vertical app, and if this happens you can bet your last dollar that they'll brand and promote the result in much the same way Sloan will do with .LRN.
So I doubt you're going to see opposition to your efforts to market .LRN as a branded app.
