LMS Integration Winter 2007 UnConference collobaration idea

The pitch

I suspect there's room in the world for a quality pluggable Lightweight LMS integration portlet and, not entirely coincidentally, Unicon developed a stab at one.

The idea would be to have a compelling accessible potentially Fluid-component-using shared user experience / UI layer, an API for plugins extracting relevant data and links from the various learning management systems, and implementations of that plugin layer for the various LMSs.

Currently JA-SIG faces inefficiency and pain in maintaining various versions of the WebCT channel, the Blackboard channel, tribal knowledge about which versions of which channels work with which versions of the learning management systems. That could be simplified by a cohesive integration portlet with well-defined plugins for the various versions of the various platforms, happily Spring-wired together.

What prevents me from just doing this some weekend is lack of access to test instances of the proprietary LMSs. Is the Post-Un-Conference a chance to get together devs interested in the various LMSs to get this done?

Value proposition for participants:

Tada! instead of your own hacked LMS integration, you're now on shared open source code with a UI plausibly on the roadmap for Fluid enhancement! Shared UI efforts across institutions, shared effort to develop working LMS-specific plugins, a total ability to "go your own way" in any or all parts of this as you see necessary....

Concerns

Duplicated effort with CANS

It sounds great, but what do folks think about how this relates to CANS?

Is there a danger of duplicating effort?