Cambridge Hackathon -- 7-11 July 2008

The weeklong Sakai Hackathon has come to an end, and its been an interesting week. During the course of the week more than 15 people from over 10 organizations participated; though not everyone was able to be present for the entire week, including a few key folks, such as Nicolaas Matthijs and Nick Desmet, who were only available for the first part of the week due to prior commitments, and others were distracted at times by production issues at home. The overall goal of the Hackathon – exploring the implementation of designs from the UX Improvement Project using Cambridge's MySakai and sdata approach – was a general success. While the UX scenarios from the Improvement Project were not completely implemented by the end of the week and accessibility and internationalization were not entirely finished, our collective understanding of what it will take to do so was greatly increased. This work also helped demonstrate another approach to usefully separate back-end development (e.g., java) from front-end, user experience and interface work (e.g., javascript, html, design). Such a separation can certainly help facilitate collaboration in a community such as ours, where the full complement of skill sets required for completing a project can be drawn from multiple organizations.

The work initiated at the Hackathon will continue beyond just this week. (Cambridge, in fact, will be offering much of this functionality and some redesigned tool interfaces to their campus community near the end of this month!) We hope to have a server available soon where you can explore the outcomes of the Hackathon and think about where you could contribute to and leverage this effort yourself. Please contact me for more information. In the meantime, some key points of interest are:

• A dashboard.
• Add-and-remove widgets.
• Drag-and-drop rearrangement of widgets.
• Accessibility for the overall page (e.g., dashboard view) and within widgets, using tabs and arrow keys; the Tools widget was the one prototyped during the Hackathon.
• Internationalization for widgets; the Tools widget was again the prototype, and while the internationalization infrastructure was basically completed, time ran out before any translations were made in order to fully demonstrate it.
• It all can be run alongside the current Sakai experience, if you have users who would prefer the existing interfaces for the time being.

Thanks to the folks at CARET for organizing and running the event!