>On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:04 PM, Poley, Sean A. Mr. <[log in to unmask]>
>wrote:
>
>> The Niihka Advisory Committee Charter is currently being drafted
>> (Please see attached).
>
>Two things:
>
>1) more about process, but shouldn't this (the attached Word document)
>be on the Confluence wiki, since this is where we've been doing all
>our work?

I have to agree, we probably should have put this on the wiki.

>
>2) I've started to get worried about the lack of an explicit
>distinction between CLE and OAE in our planned governance process. In
>short, I worry that if we don't explicitly account for this we
>potentially setup a situation that will tend to focus on short-term
>strategy around CLE at the expense of long-term strategy around OAE.
>Is there something we can do to avoid this?

Sean and I were discussing this just the other day and attempting to get
this sort of thing into the wording of the charter. What came out of this
was point #2 under Responsibilities.

"Work with the Functional Requirements Committee to identify the
appropriate sourcing for development to ensure that Niihka leverages the
Sakai community and the IT-provided software developer resources to
maximize the strategic growth of Niihka"


However, I'm not sure this is clear enough. I want to fight for the option
of having a portion of our 3 developer FTEs be available for work on OAE
(next-gen Sakai) AND/OR by working within the Community, if and when there
is not sufficient "sensible" work to keep them busy with CLE. I'll give an
example: we shouldn't expending a lot of resources on building bells and
whistles into rwiki* when we could be spending those resources to help out
with xwiki, even though xwiki isn't technically part of OAE. It just makes
more sense to work with the Community to leverage the synergy. It benefits
us as well as others. Working on other issues in OAE such as the
assessment logic that Bruce has introduced makes a lot of sense, but not
everyone will see it that way. So we need to make this Community approach
clear.


*This is the standard wiki tool built into Sakai. It is widely considered
in the Sakai community that it is not worth the effort of making this
better as there are much better tools on the horizon.

>
>This is also related to a much bigger problem, which is the lack of a
>larger longer-term strategy that cuts across all IT at MU; one simple
>example is the ovelap between the portal and Niihka; we have no
>governance structure (or even mechanisms for informal conversation)
>across these concerns. The result, again, will tend to lead to ad hoc
>decision-making without clear overarching strategy.
>-- 
>Bruce D'Arcus
>Associate Professor, Graduate Director
>Department of Geography
>Miami University
>234 Shideler Hall
>Oxford, Ohio 45056