JA-SIG Announces New Board Directors
Five Directors Join Board of Higher Education Open Source Organization
Princeton, NJ – September 1, 2008 – JA-SIG, the non-profit, global consortium of higher education institutions, partners, and affiliates dedicated to sharing open source software solutions, today announced the names of five community members who were newly elected to its Board of Directors, effective September 1, 2008:
John Lewis is the Chief Software Architect for Unicon Inc, the leading independent provider of open source training, consulting, and support in higher education. John is a 16 year veteran of the software engineering industry. His passions are large-scale enterprise architecture, open-source technologies, and agile software development methods. John has been working heavily in Java-based enterprise information portals since 2001 and is the lead developer of Spring Portlet MVC, which provides JSR 168 support in the Spring Framework. He is also active in several higher education open source communities, including uPortal and Sakai.
Benn Oshrin is currently Project Manager for Rutgers University's Identity Management Group, which leads the JA-SIG CAS community development process, and is establishing an additional initiative in Identity registries. Benn has been a member of the higher education community for 16 years, including 10 years of employment at Columbia University as a system administrator, developer, and manager; as well as student affiliations at various institutions, including Yale University. Benn has also contributed to and released several projects under open source licenses.
Katya Sadovsky is one of the senior technical staff of the Administrative Computing Services, University of California, Irvine. Her responsibilities include technical leadership on various web development projects including the campus business portal and content management system. As a member of the Enterprise Architecture team, she consults and assists in the design and development of complex Web-based, database driven applications. Katya is also a member of the campus Kuali implementation team.
Robert Sherratt has worked in higher education for 14 years, initially developing eLearning materials and systems before moving to the University of Hull in 1999. At Hull, following on from his work as the developer of the institutional Intranet, he became Head of Systems Integration for the e-Services Integration Group. The group is responsible for the development and operation of the services delivered within the institutional portal which has now been in production for five years. More recently, Robert has also moved back to work with eLearning systems, project managing the roll out of Sakai as Hull’s new learning management system.
John F (Barry) Walsh was elected to a second three-year term on the JA-SIG Board and was subsequently chosen to take over the position of Board Chair. After several years in both US and international industry, Barry has been at Indiana University (IU), with appointments in both the CIO and CFO organizations. During the period 1998-2007, he held joint appointments in both these organizations, a bilateral experience that provided a unique view of how technology is perceived and used as well as how it is delivered. In May 2007 he was appointed Associate Vice-President for Enterprise Software, with an organization of 133 developers and managers responsible for the acquisition, design, development and implementation of the institution’s major academic and business systems, for data warehousing and decision support services, the enterprise service delivery portal and the attendant enterprise application integration, including process workflow. In 2003, Barry co-founded what is now the Kuali movement that is creating application software to serve the financial, research and student services functions in higher education. He did the bulk of the work of recruiting and engaging the investing partners for the Financial and Research initiatives and was one of the charter members of the Kuali Foundation Board of Directors. Barry served on the NACUBO Board of Directors as its technical liaison. He has also served on numerous EDUCAUSE committees and for four years was the Director of the EDUCAUSE Management Institute that provides leadership training for new or aspiring managers in information technology in higher education.
JA-SIG Board directors are nominated by the community and elected by institutional and commercial members of the organization. Higher education institutions and commercial partners are encouraged to join JA-SIG. Information about membership may be found on the JA-SIG website: http://www.ja-sig.org/membership.
JA-SIG, Inc., is a non-profit (501(c)3), international consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates supporting open source software development and promoting open computing architectures for higher education. JA-SIG has been in operation for over eight years, holding regular conferences and sponsoring open source software applications like uPortal, the enterprise-grade portal solution, and CAS, a flexible Central Authentication Service deployed for single sign-on. For more information, visit the JA-SIG website at http://www.ja-sig.org.
