Changes to Sakai Community Meetings and Staffing Support
Charles Severance
Dear Sakai Community,
Over the past several years, Sakai’s membership base has declined, reducing the amount of funding available to support community coordination and operations.
As a result, we are no longer able to fund the accessibility coordinator, release manager, community manager roles at their current levels. To align our expenses with the funds available, we need to make several changes to the community meeting schedule:
The Sakai Core Team will meet once per month.
The Teaching and Learning & UX Team will meet once per month.
The regular Accessibility Team meetings will be discontinued.
These changes are financial decisions and are not a reflection of the importance or quality of the work performed by these teams and coordinators. Their contributions are valuable to Sakai and to the institutions and individuals who rely on the project.
We recognize that reducing staff support and meeting frequency will affect how the community works together. We will need to make thoughtful use of the remaining meeting time, rely more heavily on asynchronous communication, actively engage as open source participants, and focus our available resources on the work that is most essential to sustaining Sakai.
Over the next few months, we will be exploring ideas and sending messages in an effort to raise additional funds through new memberships, grants, and other sources. If your organization is interested in becoming a Sakai member, reactivating its Sakai membership—even if an organization no longer runs Sakai—or has other ideas for raising funds, please contact me or any member of the Sakai Project Management Committee.
We are grateful to everyone who has contributed time, expertise, institutional support, and funding to the Sakai community. We will continue to be transparent about our financial position and work with the community to establish a sustainable path forward.
Sincerely,
Chuck Severance
On Behalf of the Sakai Project Management Committee
https://www.sakailms.org/sakai-lms-community