On Walled Gardens

The first issue is whether there is justification to try to reimplement an “educational” version of software when a perfectly good and popular generic version already exists.

It's important to be cautious of walled gardens. On the one hand there is the value of building a component in a tighter knit community where it can be more easily steered to meet very specific needs of the community and where the bandwidth of collaboration is limited to a manageable level. On the other hand there is the value of wider collaboration and thereby drawing a larger pool of contributions and interest.
As Michael Feldstein notes in his blog, there are times when higher education has unique needs and something to contribute by going after a need in a by, for, and about higher education way.

I worry too much. Lately, I've been worrying about two things in JA-SIG and uPortal. One of them is going after non-higher-ed-specific concerns in the context of JA-SIG. Yes, uPortal should have an awesome syndicated feed reader JSR-168 portlet. However, every other JSR-168-supporting portal on the planet has exactly this same need. There's nothing higher-education-specific about a syndicated feed reader. Therefore, the way to get the most participation, mindshare, involvement, etc., for such a portlet is outside the context of JA-SIG, is it not? Would it not be best to fork a SourceForge, Java.NET, JavaForge, etc. project wherein interested uPortal, LifeRay, JetSpeed 2, StringBeans, and other portal deployers with this need can collaborate on a single excellent syndicated feed reader portlet for use in all these portals? Or on several of them. There may be be room for several syndicated feed readers with different feature sets, but I don't think their adopters will be neatly partitioned by portal platform or even by higher ed vs. commercial. There are opportunities here.

Another worry is not going after higher-education-specific concerns in the context of JA-SIG. Java really is an architecture that can be used effectively in the administration of higher education. We've got to have some shared needs that are higher-education-administration but not pedogogical tools (teaching tools intended for use in the context of particular courses are likely most appropriately implemented as Sakai tools). What are they, and how to can we effectively pursue them in the context of JA-SIG to everyone's benefit?