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The original Sakai software descended from work by Indiana University, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of Michigan, uPortal, and the
Open Knowledge Initiative. Lots of the original code came from University of Michigan’s
framework, known as CHEF, the CompreHensive collaborativE Framework.
(Programmers do love to stretch their acronyms.) As the new shared infrastructure
matured, a joke ran through the community that this was Iron Chef, a reference to the
Japanese competitive cooking show. It seemed right on the surface: this collaboratively
built framework was stronger, smarter, faster, and more international than any of the
preceding single-institution systems. It also felt right as an observation of the community
in development: programmers and academics coming together across varied institutional
cultures interacting in some highly formalized ways to duke it out over which
implementation choice was best. Who would win the challenge? An established programmer
from a long-committed university or a smart upstart designer from a tiny
consulting firm? The software was ultimately named for the “King of Iron Chefs,” Hiroyuki
Sakai, with hope that it would be the winningest of all education and collaboration
frameworks.
After a couple of years, an effort to rewrite the backend services was undertaken. This
started out as the kernel rewrite effort, morphed into the kernel rearchitecture effort,
then got clear enough that it became two separate but aligned efforts called kernel 1
and kernel 2. A major user interface redesign was undertaken at the same time, addressing
both the user interaction and user experience layers. Because the production
version was numbered in the 2s, work on the next generation of the frontend of Sakai
became variously known as Sakai 3 and 3akai (pronounced three-ak-EYE). It got maddeningly
confusing to talk about Sakai 2 on K1 as distinguished from 3akai-ux on K2.
The kernel team resolved on nakamura as the name for the backend services. This name
benefitted from referring both to an Iron Chef, Koumei Nakamura, and to the first
Japanese national to scale K2, Shoji Nakamura. Let it never be said that Sakai programmers
don’t love the act of naming.
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