ARCHIVED: What is Sakai?

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The Sakai Project began as a $6.8 million community source software development project founded by the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI). The purpose of the project, which received a $2.4 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was to produce open source Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software. The Sakai Partners Program (SPP) extends this community source project to other academic institutions around the world, and is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and SPP member contributions.

In October 2005, the Sakai Project announced the creation of the Sakai Foundation, a non-profit membership corporation to provide a permanent home for the growing Sakai community. In December 2012, the Sakai Foundation merged with Jasig to create the Apereo Foundation, which continues to provide Sakai developers, adopters, and users a place to coordinate efforts.

"Sakai" is not an acronym; it is simply the name given to the project and the software, initially conceived as extending the CHEF technology architecture. CHEF, nearly an acronym for "CompreHensive collaborativE Framework", was an online system designed and implemented at the University of Michigan to enable online communities to maintain relationships and share information. Chef Sakai is a Japanese cooking artist.

Oncourse is IU's implementation of the Sakai software.

For further information, including details about core and partner institutions, implementations, commercial affiliates, and details on Sakai installation and setup, visit the Sakai website.