Ernie,
by "posting your thoughts" I was thinking along the lines of you posting what you are planning (NOT our emails) so we can get feedback and find common ground within the community.
Here is some more background on our situation for others.
What we have now:
Apache and a whole bunch of Perl scripts (a.k.a. WebCT Standard Edition). Content is saved in folders on the file system and is served by Apache. Permissions are taken care of with .htaccess. There's a web UI to upload content to the file system. Recently WebDAV was added.
Our time frame:
Moving content over to dotLRN will be an important part of migration and we want to start migration to the second version of dotLRN in the third quarter of this year. We will help push the second version of dotLRN in the process by using the dotLRN source.
What we need here:
An elegant solution that dovetails with the needs of others. Something clean and simple. A general OpenACS based solution that should be tasty enough for others to want to extend and improve on it.
Our priorities right now:
help get dotLRN 1.0 out, i18n (almost finished), external authentication (work will start in March), a solution to the problem above (just starting to think about it), complex survey (will be coordinating with Sloan on this after the 1.0 release), work on improving communication, work on the consortium idea, work on additional packages for dotLRN (Events, Research, Wimpy Point, Curriculum, etc.)
