The Sakai project (http://www.sakaiproject.org/) reflects a revolutionary model for integrating Open Source development into higher education. Sakai aims to create a Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE)---a web application for managing course materials and research project collaboration. The University of Arizona is a member of the Sakai Educational Partners Program (SEPP) and contributes to the requirements and development of Sakai. Sakai is a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application combining many prominent Open Source Java frameworks (Hibernate, Spring Framework and JavaServer Faces, to name a few). The promise of this unique tool has rallied a large contingent of universities and community colleges who have committed to designing, implementing, testing and deploying Sakai. This talk will introduce the burgeoning field of Open Source tools in higher education, then will present the features, software architecture and the community development process behind Sakai.