To me, the .LRN consortium should remain, the brand has value but
that's not the real reason. One thing we have not done in OpenACS is
find a way to aggregate funds to pay for infrastructural/QA work. .LRN
has member organisations who have voiced over and over that that
release management and QA are critical -- .LRN is the only vehicle
they have now that can co-fund that work. And to be
clear I think unless there is some funding behind doing release
management, we will never get to the point where the release quality
is where it needs to be for us to really grow.
One thing Al said I disagree with: "Ultimately, I don't care what we
call the project or community but it should be one entity with a
single focus, direction, and discipline."
I think we are largely "one community" now but I don't think is that
it's reasonable to say that we are going to have "one direction". As
it stands we (Xarg) don't use .LRN now and for the kinds of websites
we build we are not likely to in the future. The fraction of the
dotlrn code we have interest in using has declined a lot over time,
primarily because we don't have need of things like LORS or
other IMS/education stuff.
Also on release management -- core and critical packages (forums,
file-storage, etc) is large enough and hard enough to QA/release with
the resources we have now, I don't see how we can sustain monolithic
releases also I think the discussion of what needs to be done for release
management is important but pretty orthogonal to the
organisational structure/branding of OpenACS/.LRN.
